This statement:

is contradicted by this statement:

It's true that situational awareness will do more for you than being trained but caught unawares. My wife does ju-jutsu training. They teach the women that if they are confronted by a large male attacker, unless they have no other option they should run for the exact reason you bring up, it is hard to land a devastating first blow and the first blow they land will devastate you. I tell her find a weapon, since we have kids and it's likely she won't be able to run without leaving them. Untrained, even with a kitchen knife she's not that scary. I want her trained so that hopefully she could intimidate an attacker and as a last resort have a better chance of landing that first blow.

When I was in my teens I did farm work during holidays that strengthened me quite a bit, so in that case yes, but not because of a "sense of reliance and independence".

Yeah, if that had never happened they'd be totally wrong about it. What ignorant fools! I think I'll plug my ears up and sing "lalalalala" now. Or chant "not listening, not listening".

I did plenty of chores and sport and it never solved any bullying problems for me.

Given opponents of equal fighting skill the larger will tend to win. Not always but it's the way to bet. Being trained to fight to a higher level than your potential opponents is a good way for an individual to overcome bullying but on a larger scale won't solve bullying but can change who the bullies are. There is also a lot of bullying that isn't physical. How do you use self defense classes to combat embarrassing pictures on facebook?

So you'll talk to the parents and if they don't respond to your satisfaction you'll fight them to the death? Unless I've misunderstood, I think you need to revise this plan. If you win, it ends with you in prison and bullies doing whatever they like to your child while you are occupied with much tougher bullies.

It is not legal to own a firearm for self defense in Australia, although it was apparently legal for Susan Falls to use one but illegal to sell to her.

I am neither experiencing nor expressing any agitation and I am still making sense. It would appear that you are trolling.

You could say it like that I suppose, if your intent was to mislead. They used his name as a domain name. You're the one trying to spin.

You apparently haven't read the book. The Wealth of Nations discusses international trade including import duties etc. It was not a society of exclusively locally produced goods. The morality of the population is the morality of the market. If a market has no morality, it is not a reflection on markets it is a reflection on the population.

How many find the site by searching for "independent grassroots supporters of Ron Paul" and how many by searching for "Ron Paul". They use his name and reputation to generate hits and then want to sell those hits to him. If their website is so independent, why didn't they put their own name on it instead?

Our murder rate was declining before the gun laws (yes, even including the mass shootings that prompted them). NZ doesn't ban semi-auto's or require registration of most firearms and hasn't had a mass shooting for a similar length of time as us, so it would seem that our gun laws haven't prevented any mass shootings either. While people proclaim our current lack of mass shootings as a success of gun laws they ignore that we still have mass killings such as the Childers Palace fire and the Quakers Hill Nursing Home fire. Apparently murder doesn't matter so much if you burn them to death instead of shooting them.

Our gun laws didn't make the place safer they just made people who don't understand the issue feel better. There was not such fear of bikie gangs when guns could be bought by everyone, I don't even remember it being an issue, and "glassing" was something that happened at bikie bars and dive bars frequented by criminals, NOT your average bar or nightclub. Not that glassing would be affected directly by gun laws but I don't think your idea that gun laws made us safer stands up to scrutiny.

No his argument boils down to that it is not rightfully their property. Resolving property disputes is a function of courts universally accepted by libertarians. The reality is that pretty near all the traffic to that site would be made up of people who were duped into thinking it was a site by Ron Paul. The only reason the cyber squatters aren't being condemned on this site is so that people can have a cheap shot at Ron Paul.

Really?

The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a 1759 book by Adam Smith. It provided the ethical, philosophical, psychological, and methodological underpinnings to Smith's later works, including The Wealth of Nations...

Sounds like you must be talking about the other free market, not the Adam Smith thing.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I'm not American but I do believe in the right to revolt against despotic government. I know about various abuses and wars of the US government which are common knowledge. There are at least a couple of reasons why Americans have not risen up against their government:
1. The conditions of life for the vast majority of Americans is far better than would be had in a civil war.
2. If you had enough people to win a revolution you could just win an election instead. You can complain about a rigged election system all you like but what proportion of the population do you need to win a civil war? If you had that many people turn up to vote instead of fight you could get your changes without getting killed.

Believe it or not, not all people who believe in the right to revolution are some sort of trigger happy crazies just looking for an excuse.

I'm an Australian and don't like our gun laws much but it is a myth that we have almost total confiscation. We didn't have right to carry previously anyway, most semi-auto's are gone but they've been replaced with other firearms. We have just as many as before but not the same type and not the free access we used to. Nevertheless, despite my dislike for our laws I will say this: they were brought in legally and do not violate our constitution. If I were an American I would find many US gun laws intolerable because of the constitutional violation. If we had the 2nd amendment I would have hidden my guns.

The fact that not everyone resists government oppression successfully is no reason to disarm people and make sure no one can. Perhaps the Libyan resistance wouldn't have survived until NATO stepped in if they were unarmed. They could have been quietly killed at Qaddafi's leisure. Instead of arguing with me though, why don't you make contact with some Libyan resistance and ask them if they would have been better off disarmed. Be sure to get back to me with their answer.

It indicates that the 1940's military did not believe that populations with inferior small arms are incapable of resistance. This is not changed because of new weapons technology since civilians also have newer tech than they did in the 1940's.

In the case of resisting police and the military it is not a game where you win by scoring more points (kills) than the opposition. Politics comes into play. Any government has the potential to be oppressive but western democratic governments are not going to wholesale slaughter their populations with everybody looking. The population outnumbers the military by far and asymmetry in civilian and military deaths is a given in a civil war but not necessarily the deciding factor.

What about them? Nobody is saying small arms defend against nuclear weapons. Do you seriously believe the US government would nuke a US city if the citizens took up arms? Nonsense. Check out the Eureka Stockade as an Australian example of when poorly armed citizens fought the government, lost the battle but won the political point.