I know a number of people who have gone down this route, including Senators. For example, here's Senator Wyden's proposal to add $5 billion in mandatory funding to investigate and target sexual abusers [1]. The problem with these efforts is that they're expensive: fighting child exploitation requires enormous amounts of funding.

Guess what doesn't require billions of dollars? Mandatory scanning paid for by tech companies, followed by dumping the billions of hits they produce [2] on overworked police and clearinghouses that mostly ignore them.

[1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-eshoo... [2] https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/cybersecurity/su...

Then fund the initiative by taxing those same tech companies. "This problem is hard or expensive to address" does not assuage the desire to fix the problem.

There are countless reasons to be against these chat controls, but it's easy for a layperson to understand how they would address their specific concerns. The only way to effectively counter that is providing an alternative that does a better job.