Good comparison! One is viewed as a tool for people to protect themselves and their families, while the other is viewed as a tool for bad people to hurt other people and their families.
To expound on that distinction, I think it is easy for people to imagine a scary armed criminal, perhaps breaking into their house, and imagine being able to stop them by brandishing or shooting a gun at them.
It is comparatively harder for people to build a mental model of how encryption stops an unseen hacker accessing their data, and obviously most people value their life more than their data.
The difference in threat models applicable to end-to-end encryption versus hop-by-hop encryption is even more subtle, allowing disingenuous politicians to claim to support encryption while simultaneously weakening it.
