because he thought he had heard a noise in the family room. Grabbing his revolver, he slowly opened his bedroom door and crept stealthily into the darkened hallway, where he stepped barefooted onto a cockroach—down here we get cockroaches large enough to derail trains—causing him (the homeowner) to leap straight into the air and shoot his gun, the bullet from which went through the wall and into the garage, where it hit the circuit breaker box and cut off the electrical power to the house, thus shutting down the videocassette recorder in the family room, where the homeowner’s eleven-year-old son had been watching Debbie Does Dallas. So don’t try to tell me that guns have no place in the home. Don’t try to tell it to the Founding Fathers of this nation, either. For one thing, they are dead. For another thing, they specifically considered the question of guns when they wrote the Constitution, and after much debate, they agreed on the following unequivocal wording regarding the right of the people to keep and bear arms:

ARTICLE XMZXMZBX: If guns were outlaws, then outlaws would be guns..lm-10

So you can play it any way you want it, but this is one homeowner whose motto is: “You can have my gun when you threaten to pry one of my fingers off the trigger.”

Of course, if you do get a gun, you need to follow certain basic safety procedures, such as:

1. Don’t keep it loaded.

2. Don’t even have the proper caliber of bullet for it.

3. Keep it someplace safe, such as a safe-deposit box in Switzerland.

What other steps can you take to protect yourself? One approach that combines the advantage of costing a lot of money with the advantage of really ticking off your neighbors is ...

The Electronic Burglar Alarm System

Essentially, this is a complex system of modern, sophisticated, state-of-the-art, fully computerized components, costing no more than