Any one of the dozens of handgun combination safes on the market would do the job. I can open mine in about three seconds.

Of course, the most important thing is education, not gun locks/safes. In fact, you should be teaching your kids gun safety even if you don't own any firearms, because guess what? One or more of their friend's parents do.

I think you'll find it's rather impossible to plead self-defense when you were engaged in the commission of a felony in any of the 50 United States. What choice did he have? Did you seriously ask that question? Here's a notion: Try not breaking into houses.

It also negates your ability to do a tactical reload while keeping the firearm functional, which is why no sane police department issues firearms with magazine safeties. Nor should any civilian shopping for a self-defense firearm consider one. On a range or hunting toy it's not a big deal, but there's no place for a magazine safety on a self defense weapon. The action of checking the chamber is not rocket science and no amount of technology is going to make up for poor gun handling.

I'm calling bullshit on that unless you have a citation. The M1911 went through two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and is still used by a handful of military units today. It went through all that but has claimed more accidental deaths than enemy KIAs? That strains credibility. More to the point, the M9 is no safer than the M1911 with regards to negligent discharges. Both have manual safeties. Both go boom if you disengage that safety and squeeze the trigger.

They were used plenty in the aforementioned conflicts. In WW1 they were the preferred weapon when clearing enemy trenches. Which would you prefer when clearing a trench? A semi-automatic pistol that's easy to handle in tight quarters or a large bolt action rifle? A shotgun would be the ideal weapon of course, and we did use them, but they weren't issued as widely as the M1911.

Pistols are primarily a sidearm in this day and age, particularly as carbines have become the weapon of choice (pistols aren't even standard issue in most of the military these days, not even for most officers) but they still have a place on the battlefield. And at home for that matter, police and civilian CCW'ers find it rather hard to tote an AR-15 around with the same ease as a service pistol.

Would you deem it acceptable to apply the same idea to other civil rights? Maybe African-Americans should have just left the South instead of using the Federal Government to compel their home states to honor their civil rights?

Love it or hate it, the 2nd Amendment is incorporated against the States. Actions taken with an eye towards restricting that right will not be looked kindly upon by the Federal Courts or Congress.

I like the implied conclusion that robbers are afraid of people with phones but not afraid of people with guns because they can easily disarm and kill the untrained civilian. Hint: If they can take a gun from you with ease they can probably get the phone out of your hands before you complete the call. Your whole argument annoys me, because it comes across as exceedingly condescending towards people that have made the choice to defend themselves with something a tad bit more effective than 911.

"911: When seconds count, help is only minutes away."

If I want to unplugged I'll put the phone into airplane mode or just plain ignore the calls. I want "unplugged" to be my choice, not something compelled upon me because my carrier has an inferior network. :)

The standards haven't exactly converged, IS-95/IS-2000 (better known as CDMA to lay-people, though that's the air interface, not the standard) remains incompatible with most of the GSM family (GSM, WCDMA). LTE does support IS-95/IS-2000, with seamless handover, though this matters less than you'd think it would because most phones only support a handful of LTE bands and won't find a usable LTE signal out of their home country. That said, all of the higher end phones these days are multi mode, my Moto X will do GSM, WCDMA, LTE, and IS-95/IS-2000 (CDMA), so I can take it almost anywhere on Earth and use it. It's the same with the flagship Samsung and iPhones that Verizon sells.

To answer this question:

That segmentation wasn't because of technological limitations, it has to do with the respective financial resources of the two companies. T-Mobile just doesn't have the money to build a network to match Verizon, nor do they regard it as a priority to do so. T-Mobile is the "good enough" carrier, as reflected by their prices.

You fail to understand either of those cases. Cruikshank was a reference to natural law rights, "neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence". Further, limiting the applicability of the 2nd Amendment the Federal Government was a direct violation of the 14th Amendment, one which the McDonald ruling later rectified.

Miller doesn't mean what you think it means either. More to the point, it was incorrectly decided, because the weapons in question (short barrel shotguns) were in common use by the military of the day, which was the criteria that SCOTUS used to determine whether or not a particular type of weapon could be regulated. If you're opposed to the right to keep and bear arms you should be leery of citing that precedent, because applying it today would undermine the so-called assault weapon bans so desired by the anti-rights crowd. Common military use? Check. Useful to the militia? Check.

You also fail to acknowledge the political reality of the United States, where gun rights remain popular, and all of the enthusiasm is on the pro-RKBA side of the fence. Few people will base their vote on gun control, but millions regularly base it on gun rights. You couldn't even get UBCs through the United States Senate, because nobody trusts the motivation of the people (Feinstein, Schemer, et. al) who were pushing them, with good reason if you look at what their political allies have done in their home states.

They've had spectrum around these parts since the Voicestream days. They just don't bother to build it out. Or if they do they restrict 3G and 4G services to the cities and use GSM/EDGE to fill in the gaps. My hometown gets EDGE service along the highway and nothing once you're a few miles away, until you get sufficiently far enough away from T-Mo's native network to be allowed to connect to AT&T.

The last bit was particularly infuriating when I was a T-Mobile customer. They used to (and I think still do, based on their maps) restrict where you could use AT&T roaming, so that people couldn't force their phones to AT&T in an area that ostensibly had T-Mobile coverage. Only problem is the location area codes on AT&T's network don't neatly align with T-Mobile's dead zones, so you end up with an island of awesome T-Mobile signal, surrounded by nothing, further surrounded by AT&T roaming.

Nothing infuriated me more than doing a network scan, seeing "Cingular", but having to deal with 10-20 miles of no service (except 911) until I entered that part of the AT&T network I was allowed to use.

That's actually another point in favor of Verizon, come to think of it. Verizon is the only big carrier that doesn't care how much roaming you do. The others will cut you off after a certain threshold of roaming data or minutes, because they don't want to pay for it. Verizon doesn't care if 100% of your usage is on partner networks. Heck, they'll even let you change your service address to partner areas where they have no native coverage at all.

You're behind the times, Verizon's phones all take SIM cards now. All of the flagship phones (iPhone, Galaxy S4/S5, the Moto X) are global phones that will work virtually anywhere (except Japan and China). My X supports GSM, UMTS, IS-95/IS-2000, and LTE on Bands 4 and 13.

Besides, IS-95 was arguably superior to GSM in the voice department. Higher spectral efficiency, better voice quality, and most importantly it was interoperable with the old AMPS network. That means nothing today, but it was huge when digital voice was rolling out and the carriers had huge legacy AMPS networks they needed seamless handoffs with. GSM's TDMA air interface was already obsolete in the 90s and it's telling that UMTS did away with it in favor of a CDMA based air interface.

It's only "practically for free" if you discount the monies required to keep that ancient outside plant up and running. That's one of the reasons why Verizon got out of the dry loop DSL business. It simply doesn't pay the bills to hook someone up with just DSL. Better to let the plant sit there and rot than to service unprofitable customers.

Talk to somebody who works in the business about the maintenance overhead of all that ancient copper wiring. The only thing that's worse is the expense of trying to replace it all with modern technology.

Different business, but this is part of the reason why cable internet costs keep going up. They see the writing on the wall for TV and phone service. The former will eventually be delivered over the internet, the latter is being slaughtered by wireless. Meanwhile the expenses to maintain the HFC network remain constant. If you can't sell triple plays to meet those expenses you're going to make up the margin elsewhere.

Actually it's a T-Mobile created problem. Nothing stopped them from bidding in the 700mhz auction, except for the part where they blew all their money (billions in fact) on the earlier 1700/2100mhz AWS auction. Nobody forced T-Mobile to do that. A lot of industry watchers scratched their head at that move, wondering why T-Mobile was buying high frequency spectrum to build out a last generation UMTS network when LTE and the 700mhz auction were already on the horizon.

More to the point, there are whole swathes of the United States where they hold valid PCS licenses that they've never used. It's not a spectrum limitation in these markets, it's an unwillingness to invest the required monies to service them. T-Mobile will never match Verizon or AT&T's footprint. One they don't have the money, two they're on record saying they don't believe that sort of coverage is important to their customers. On that last point they may be right, there's certainly room in the market for a value oriented competitor to the big boys, but so long as they have grossly inferior coverage they'll never really be in a position to dethrone Verizon or AT&T.

Verizon and AT&T are often condemned for the behaviors of their wireline divisions, wherein they seemingly cherry pick the most profitable markets for FiOS and uVerse, leaving the rest to rot on last generation DSL service. The irony is that T-Mobile does the exact same thing with wireless but is rarely condemned out for such business decisions.

I believe the operation being attempted right now is:

Ukraine=Crimea=Rusia

This is one of those few times that someone used == where = is the correct option!

3) Take over Ukraine

That's because no amount of creative pricing and sexy marketing (random musing: CZJ was way better than pink motorcycle lady with annoying voice) can hide the fact that T-Mobile has a 1990s network in 2014. Seriously, it's pathetic unless you live in a major city, and even then you'll have to deal with inferior indoor coverage as compared to carriers with 850mhz licenses.

Here in Upstate NY your options as soon as you leave the city limits range from EDGE to "roaming on AT&T" (if T-Mo allows it where you're at, they don't in all areas) to "no service at all". I experimented with T-Mobile back in 2007-2008 when I couldn't afford to pay Verizon's premium prices and had to deal with zero coverage for the last ten minutes of my thirty minute daily commute. They've not really improved all that much since then, at least if their coverage maps are any indication.

The analogy that I've long used is that Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.

I don't think you understand the criminal mindset. You're not dealing with a United States Navy Seal. You're dealing with an untrained lowlife scumbag who's looking for the easiest mark he can find. The vast majority of defensive gun uses end with a simple display, not the actual use of deadly force.

More to the point, any competent self-defense instructor will teach you how to avoid being disarmed. If you think you're getting my firearm away from me you're in for a rude surprise.