Just a quick note: if you have the D&D Insider subscription, then you have all of those books' rules built into it for character creation. I just run it to update all of my players' characters and they print out their new sheets with new items and skills, etc when they level.

Thank you. I really wish I had mod points right now.

Kinfe? Simple. Go for -any part of the body that is within reach. There fixed that. Killing someone with a knife is FAR easier than with a gun. A knife only needs to penetrate 2 inches into the chest cavity to cause damage to sensitive organs and a good slash to an arm or leg will have you bleeding out and going into shock log before any help arrives. Add to that your body pumping more blood due to adrenaline and you ar screwed if caught with a knife. Now add to that the fact that a knife wielding assailant will "hit" you more than once with a variety of stabs and slashes and will never have to "reload". And before you or anyone else goes there, no it is not easy or advisable to try to "defend" yourself against a knife attack. Your best defense for it is to run, which is also your best defense for a gun, preferably using cover and making yourself a smaller target as you run.

Someone committed to killing another person with their bare hands is not there to consider a single thing. They are there to kill the person and they -want- to relish it. Also, the human body has some fairly fragile parts. a good shot across the head with a stick or other solid object and you will be in the ground fairly soon.

If I had to choose to defend myself against a guy with a gun and a child with a knife, I'd choose the guy with the gun 100% of the time. You don't need to be skilled or strong to severely injure/kill someone with a knife. Also, I challenge anyone with even a modicum of skill with a gun to shoot a bunch of running/moving targets in a high stress situation. There will be more misses than hits. Guns are not the problem. Alarmist reactions, inability and/or unwillingness to learn proper gun safety, and the mentality that just in case someone -might- fly off the handle there needs to be no guns are the problem.

I wish I had mod points right now. Bravo. Seriously, everything said above is on point.

I set one up for my step-son to use. Only I know the actual gmail password, so he can't log into directly. I also have a forward of all the mail he gets to another account of mine just in case. Lastly, I set him up with Thunderbird using a master-password that he set up which is completely different from the gmail one. In the config I just made sure only people I want emailing him are white-listed, so Thunderbird takes care of unwanted things that will only show up in the gmail interface that I go in and delete periodically.