Pretty sure my commute of 12 years had exactly zero aggressive panhandling (or unaggressive panhandling), yet just about every single person on it was wearing some flavour of them.

I've also just been in Japan, where nobody's commute has panhandling of any kind, and guess what, everyone there is tuning the world out with their headphones, too. Despite it being kind of verbotten to make noise on the subway, and the few conversations that were happening on it were very quiet.

I wasn't wearing mine during that trip. Because a relatively quiet space was actually pleasant for me to be in. American cities are so fucking noisy, and as a consequence, even people respectful of their surroundings tend to be loud.