This is a great point, and one that I've been meaning to write about either here or elsewhere ever since the issue starting coming up.

Scaring people into giving up their rights is a tactic that's been used by both the right and the left for decades.

I think there's a general point that can be made about understanding restrictions in general and about when and why we should support them, but I don't know exactly what the general point is without resorting to a thing that most people write off as a meaningless platitude (e.g., "Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.")

I'm going to riff a little bit here, if that's okay.

I think it's worth asking--at each moment that any basic liberty that's even talked about in the constitution comes up for discussion, regardless of how you personally interpret that liberty--who benefits from a reduction in that liberty?

It's perhaps easy to say, for some people, that reducing the number of firearms in circulation is a net benefit for "the people" as a whole.

But I don't think that's a correct answer to the context of my question above. If you view the constitution as a social contract between the citizens and the government, reducing freedoms of any kind is always to the advantage of the government and always to the disadvantage of the people, even if in the short run fewer people die from firearms-related deaths.

Similarly, I would suggest that in terms of privacy, there are people who are willing to sacrifice their own privacy (as well as mine) by outlawing certain encrypted devices because they think that will make us all safer from--something? Are we going to define certain phones and tablets and computers as Assault Devices and make them illegal if they have a pretty fruit logo? Or run an OS named after a cute robot?

The problem is that our government is made up of people. People who are trained just exactly the same ways that we are: by positive and negative responses to actions. People who learn by experience that doing a thing that makes their lives easier (removing freedoms) can be accomplished by stigmatizing the exercise of that freedom.

Voila. There you have all the explanation of why freedoms are in a constant fight against being reduced. It's not because of any conspiracy or because governments are bad by default, or anything nutbaggy like that. It's because the basic approach of human nature is to make your life a little easier. That's it.

Reducing freedoms make the lives of the people in government agencies easier. That's all there is to it.

My opinion comes from some odd experiences in my life. I'm from Texas, but I live in NYC. I like guns, but I also support abortion rights. I was trained as a classical violinist but write code for a living. I studied Aristotelian philosophy and categorical, deductive logic; I work on data with inductive methods.

I think that a lot of the disagreement between parties is manufactured, that people who care deeply about liberty in whatever form it takes: guns, abortions, free speech, privacy . . . whatever--people who care about these things have a lot more in common than they often realize.

I wish there was a better way for us to work together and understand that all freedoms live or die based on our group commitment to all freedoms, not just one or two that we happen to feel good about right now.