For what it's worth, headphones are not an excuse for anything . You wear them at your own risk. You can't drive with them in California, and you have to have one ear open when riding a bike. An emergency situation can arise at any time out in public where people in the vicinity will need to pay attention and follow instruction. If some idiot's sitting there bobbing his head with his ear buds in and some cop has to grab him and throw him out of the way of first responders, so be it. So, if a cop issues commands and you can't hear him because of your ear buds, you're shit out of luck. All the more reason for people to keep their volume low enough to where they can hear what's going on in the world around them. What's next, a guy doing simulated skiing on his Google Glass walks right into traffic and gets run over, and it's the car's fault for not recognizing he was using Google Glass?