Who needs the "Castle Doctrine" when you can create an outer layer of security?

The castle doctrine is a guarantee that an irresponsible act will go unpunished.

Slinger’s castle doctrine murder says a lot about the GOP’s pro-life agenda, doesn’t it?

But as I’ve mentioned before, many homeowners don’t even bother locking their porches because the neighborhood is either safe, or the door bell is on the inside of the porch. These facts seem to get lost on most the reporters and commenters on this story.

Oddly if these gun toting scaredy-cats used their heads, which they apparently can’t do, they can secure the parameter first, with motion sensing lights etc. A quick synopsis of the killing:

WISN: Friends and family are still trying to piece together how a noisy house party ended with the shooting of West Bend East graduate Bo Morrison. Police found 20-year-old Morrison dead on the porch of a Slinger home early Saturday morning. Friends said he and others took off when police arrived to check out the noise. A short time later, the man next door called police to say he'd shot an intruder.

Here’s writer Barry Eisler’s simple solution to a simple problem:

This is self-defense we're talking about; self-protection. Not fighting, not melodrama. The point is to make the crime difficult enough to carry out that the criminal chooses to pursue his aims elsewhere … all good security is layered.

Thinking like a burglar, you are now ready to implement the outer layer of your home security. By some combination of installing motion-sensor lights, keeping bushes trimmed to avoid concealment opportunities, putting up signs advertising an alarm system, having a dog around, keeping a car or cars in the driveway, leaving on appropriate lights and the television, and making sure there are no newspapers in the driveway or mail left on the porch when you're away, you help the burglar to decide immediately during his casing or surveillance phase that he should rob someone else's house.

If the burglar isn't immediately dissuaded by the outer layer, he receives further discouragement at the next layer in. He … sees that you have deadbolt locks on all the doors, and that your advertisement was not a bluff - the windows are in fact alarmed. Okay, the guy is stupid. He keeps trying anyway. Now the second layer of security described above, which failed to deter him, works to delay him. It's taking him a long time to get in. He's making noise. At some point, the time and noise might combine to persuade him to abort (back to deterrence). 

But instead, the point of a gun is the only law…oh, those are the lyrics from the song "Liberty Valance" by Gene Pitney. I happen to, without thinking, naturally put in this kind of security myself. How expensive is a motion sensing light on the porch? $20.