Remove the ability for your phone to get "apps" from an "app store" - the same ability allows a remote party full and unilateral access to your device without your consent nor knowledge. GrapheneOS is a great start if this reality bothers you.
It may seem wild, but wilder still is having to manipulate small components under extreme duress in a sub-second period of time, while one or more lives suddenly depend on it. This is why almost all individuals who carry professionally or from experience do not use equipment with safety.
Why is every opinion qualified as "ex-military" always tend to be hyperbolic, technically incorrect and full of appeals to authority rather than actual factual information?
> There is no real-world situation where you are really just that much better at drawing and firing accurately that you will out-draw an adversary who drew on you first
There is, and it is called training. Get a timer, hit the range, and get your shots on target from concealment in under a second - while getting off the "x" - this is a standard I have trained many people to meet first-hand. And it doesn't take a specialist to get this level of training, either; it takes a few years, several thousands rounds of ammunition, and periodic maintenance, just like any craft.
> In a real world firefight you're either close enough where martial arts is relevant or you're not. If martial arts are relevant, then the guns are irrelevant.
Disparity of force - another well known concept you ought to familiarize yourself, especially as it is one of the most critical elements of legal defense in a shooting.
> Responsible citizens carry their guns in such a way that prioritizes the safety of those around them before their own personal safety.
Smart people legally carry a firearm to defend themselves and their family only from unexpected deadly threats. They would never intervene, get involved with, or otherwise "rescue" anyone else with lethal force. The "sheepdog" mentality you've put on display is honestly offensive and gives a bad name to firearms owners.
Even if I take you at your word for the sake of argument, what percentage, do you think, roughly, of gun owners are going to take "a few years, several thousand rounds of ammunition, and periodic maintenance" to get to that level? Because guns without manual safeties are sold to people regardless of such skill level, and no such demonstration of skill is required for licensing in order to purchase such a manual-safety-less weapon. Especially in legal environments where the Second Amendment is used to justify weapons purchases without or with minimal licensing or other restrictions, it is all the more incumbent for people to understand what their real limitations are, for their own safety.
> Disparity of force
Perhaps, instead of "a few years" at the range, you might want to take a couple of self-defense classes? In the range where martial arts matter, skill is a far greater determinant than sheer physical size. I'll grant you that martial arts is not a universal strategy (e.g. people in wheelchairs), but I would also argue that, of the people for whom martial arts is not a strategy, in a significant plurality if not a majority of cases where such incompatibility is due to frailty, such frailty will also usually preclude the kind of "few years, several thousand rounds of ammo, and periodic maintenance", not to mention reaction speed, that it would take to actually succeed in a drawing contest.
> They would never intervene, get involved with, or otherwise "rescue" anyone else with lethal force.
Many, many Good Samaritans out there would disagree with this offensive take that shows more how society has disintegrated than anything else in this thread. The audience should note that I, someone who does carry, am apparently a "sheepdog" because I decide to employ a manual safety, am aware of my limitations, and encourage others to be honest with themselves instead of thinking that they're big people just because they went out and bought a firearm.
For what it's worth I'm also "ex-military" and the person you are replying to is in fact wrong. For many, a "manual safety" is a preference but for others confident in their training it's not necessary or desirable. I also own a P320 (but will be purchasing a Glock soon) and stopped shooting in shortly after these stories came out. Unfortunate, because all things considered I really did like that pistol. Anyway, depending on branch of service, deployment experience, time in service etc a lot of veterans' experience with handguns is minimal, amounting to firing enough rounds on the qual range once a year. No idea about OP's experience, but these things do tend to correlate if you get my meaning.
Please upload these photos to Commons, especially if you own the rights to them; photos taken in the US before 1930 can be shared even if they are not yours, too. These stories and associated artifacts are interesting and deserve to be shared, if you're comfortable with it.
I've posted already to ancestry.com, findagrave.com, etc. (But I am inclined to do up a blog post about it so I can talk about it and embed the photos.)
Those two are both owned by Ancestry, and as you know, Ancestry requires expensive subscriptions to be of much use. I understand you have already invested a lot in it, and that US genealogy is hard to do with only public sources, but people just getting into genealogy should really avoid getting locked into Ancestry and MyHeritage.
They sell access to what others have contributed freely, sometimes they even sell you your own information back to you. For instance, if you want to use the birth and death dates, sources etc. that you've laboriously entered into a MyHeritage tree in Geni, you need a Geni Pro account. (Geni is owned by MyHeritage).
I think that of the three big American options, FamilySearch is best. Yes, it's the Mormons, and they do have an ulterior motive in their "baptism of the dead" thing, but they don't charge, they have an excellent transcribed source repository, free text search of machine-learning OCRd source documents, and actually smart matching. I'm glad their tithes pay for a state of the art genealogy research platform, I can think of a lot worse things it could have gone to!
They're also, interestingly enough, the least Anglo-biased: they don't give a child their father's last name by default, for instance.
The main downside is that they don't have any DNA features.
Graphene is a fantastic operating system for Pixel devices. Simple, reliable and with plenty of security and privacy features to make you feel warm and fuzzy. System updates are automatic, actual phone functionality is flawless, perhaps the only complaint to be had is the quality of camera, which probably lacks proprietary drivers. Signal works fairly well - even without abusive Google Services installed, making this a perfect daily mobile driver. Much gratitude to the developers of this project.
GrapheneOS does not degrade the camera quality at all. The quality will depend on the app being used. If you use Pixel Camera on GrapheneOS, you'd be getting the experience you'd get on stock OS using that same app. Similar for our built-in camera app.
Counter-point: Pixel 9 with GrapheneOS, location services off, Netguard installed and active; I engage with emergency services on a regular basis for work and always receive the public record which tracks the incident. The reported coordinates are almost always within 100' of my actual location, so YMMV.
This take demonstrates most people's inability to rationally threat-model: you would rather trust a known-abusive authority than an unknown-good samaritan, because of a false notion your bank balance is actually significant enough to warrant such an attack.
