News Today Friday 16th April - Holiday Gazumping/Mass Shooting

[1964white]

Holiday 'gazumping' in scramble for UK summer staycation accommodation

Desperate holidaymakers are trying to 'gazump' each other to secure accommodation for a summer staycation, a lettings firm has has said.

Last week, another accommodation provider said the most popular destinations, Devon and Cornwall, are already 95% booked up - but warned other areas are “catching up quickly”.

And now Rowena Owen, who runs a holiday letting firm in Kent, has told ITV she had been approached by people offering to pay double the usual price for properties that had already been booked.

“We’ve been approached by guests asking to pay double the value of the property to gazump the guests we’ve got - which I’ve never heard of in all my years in holiday letting,” she said.

Multiple Victims Are Reported in Shooting at FedEx Warehouse in Indianapolis

Several people were injured in a shooting at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis late Thursday, and the gunman was believed to have taken his own life, the police said.

Officer Genae Cook of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department told reporters early Friday morning that there were “multiple people with injuries consistent with gunshot wounds” as a result of the shooting. She said there was no active threat to the community because the assailant was believed to have died.

The FedEx warehouse where the shooting occurred is on the city’s southwest side, near the airport. The highway exit was blocked off by law enforcement vehicles.

[1964white]

You hear of gazumping in the housing market but holidays . . . .really!


Should holiday gazumping be allowed?


Bearing in mind the regular mass & police shootings particularly in America


Should gun ownership be drastically reduced?

[Ron Swanson]

The argument in favour of gun ownership to me seems to be along the lines of taking guns away from good people means only bad people have them.

And being a libertarian I strongly favour being able to defend ones self and ones property.

However in America... the rules on who is and who isn’t allowed a weapon clearly aren’t tight enough.

Americans read their constitution like a religious scholar would read the Bible (or other text) - and they are deeply suspicious of the government, an admirable trait in my view.

However, back in the days of the second amendment you’d have been talking about single bullet musket type things, with no densely populated areas.

Not automatic weapons being waved around the metropolis.

[Ron Swanson]

Staycations... not a surprise.

The sense of wanting to help our own will be around for quite some time.

Anyone with a few quid lying around earning nothing in interest would be wise to snap up a property in Whitby or elsewhere in North Yorkshire.

If it costs you £200k you’d only have to front the deposit and fees, £60k.

Five years max and you’ll cover that in profit, you’ve recouped your initial investment.

Property won’t decrease unless there is a continued period of negative net migration, and/or an oversupply of housing.

[1964white]

There'll be trouble if someone gazumps our Cornish holiday which has been booked & paid for two years, especially as we've already missed out on the last two.

[1964white]

However in America... the rules on who is and who isn’t allowed a weapon clearly aren’t tight enough.

It would seem so

[John in Louisiana]

Warning: Long (boring) explanation of the gun situation in the US.

About 220 years ago, when the constitution was being written, the framers were very worried about a number of things. First was the rise of a tyrannical government. In order to prevent that, they provided for regular elections and also for the separation of powers among different branches of government. They also feared standing armies. They had seen how in other countries a standing army had been used as a tool of coercion. However, they also knew that it might be necessary to raise an army in the event of invasion.

They therefore created the second amendment to the constitution which states that, because a well-regulated militia is necessary, anyone who wanted to be part of that militia would have the right to keep and bear arms.

Over the years, though, certain right wingers have managed to change the notion of what the second amendment is for. There is a small, but significant, minority of opinion that believes the founders wrote the second amendment because they wanted the people to have the right to violently resist or even overthrow their own government; to do with the bullet what they could not do through the ballot. We fought the Civil War over that notion and should have put it rest then and there. Sadly, that is not the case.

And these right wingers have carried the day with the people that matter most: the Supreme Court. In an appalling decision, the Court - reversing over a hundred years of precedent - has ruled that the second amendment grants an absolute individual right to own a gun.

As a result, our country is flooded with guns. Roughly 40% of the households in the US contain at least one gun. There are more guns in the US than there are people (about 1.2/1). When you realize that the size of the average household in the US is four people, you can quickly calculate that each household with at least one gun has, on average, nearly five guns.

It's insane. It's insupportable.

As a result, the United States has a gun death rate four times higher than any other nation on the face of the earth and forty times higher than the UK.

And all the while the gun nuts here will tell you that having a gun makes you safer.

Sickening.

[Lumiukko]

Warning: Long (boring) explanation of the gun situation in the US.

About 220 years ago, when the constitution was being written, the framers were very worried about a number of things. First was the rise of a tyrannical government. In order to prevent that, they provided for regular elections and also for the separation of powers among different branches of government. They also feared standing armies. They had seen how in other countries a standing army had been used as a tool of coercion. However, they also knew that it might be necessary to raise an army in the event of invasion.

They therefore created the second amendment to the constitution which states that, because a well-regulated militia is necessary, anyone who wanted to be part of that militia would have the right to keep and bear arms.

Over the years, though, certain right wingers have managed to change the notion of what the second amendment is for. There is a small, but significant, minority of opinion that believes the founders wrote the second amendment because they wanted the people to have the right to violently resist or even overthrow their own government; to do with the bullet what they could not do through the ballot. We fought the Civil War over that notion and should have put it rest then and there. Sadly, that is not the case.

And these right wingers have carried the day with the people that matter most: the Supreme Court. In an appalling decision, the Court - reversing over a hundred years of precedent - has ruled that the second amendment grants an absolute individual right to own a gun.

As a result, our country is flooded with guns. Roughly 40% of the households in the US contain at least one gun. There are more guns in the US than there are people (about 1.2/1). When you realize that the size of the average household in the US is four people, you can quickly calculate that each household with at least one gun has, on average, nearly five guns.

It's insane. It's insupportable.

As a result, the United States has a gun death rate four times higher than any other nation on the face of the earth and forty times higher than the UK.

And all the while the gun nuts here will tell you that having a gun makes you safer.

Sickening.

Brilliantly put John. As a Brit who has been here 13 years, it still boggles my mind.

[1964white]

Warning: Long (boring) explanation of the gun situation in the US.

About 220 years ago, when the constitution was being written, the framers were very worried about a number of things. First was the rise of a tyrannical government. In order to prevent that, they provided for regular elections and also for the separation of powers among different branches of government. They also feared standing armies. They had seen how in other countries a standing army had been used as a tool of coercion. However, they also knew that it might be necessary to raise an army in the event of invasion.

They therefore created the second amendment to the constitution which states that, because a well-regulated militia is necessary, anyone who wanted to be part of that militia would have the right to keep and bear arms.

Over the years, though, certain right wingers have managed to change the notion of what the second amendment is for. There is a small, but significant, minority of opinion that believes the founders wrote the second amendment because they wanted the people to have the right to violently resist or even overthrow their own government; to do with the bullet what they could not do through the ballot. We fought the Civil War over that notion and should have put it rest then and there. Sadly, that is not the case.

And these right wingers have carried the day with the people that matter most: the Supreme Court. In an appalling decision, the Court - reversing over a hundred years of precedent - has ruled that the second amendment grants an absolute individual right to own a gun.

As a result, our country is flooded with guns. Roughly 40% of the households in the US contain at least one gun. There are more guns in the US than there are people (about 1.2/1). When you realize that the size of the average household in the US is four people, you can quickly calculate that each household with at least one gun has, on average, nearly five guns.

It's insane. It's insupportable.

As a result, the United States has a gun death rate four times higher than any other nation on the face of the earth and forty times higher than the UK.

And all the while the gun nuts here will tell you that having a gun makes you safer.

Sickening.

Snd there lies the problem

Frightening John.

[Cjay]

Atleast (possibly more than) 19 children aged between 7 and 11 murdered in another mass shooting in Texas.

Not the first mass shooting this year.

Not even the first this month with 10 people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo New York.

How many school shootings where someone was killed or injured do you think have taken place this year in America?

2?
5?
Surely no more than 10?

27 I read today, that works out at just over 5 a month !!!!

Then you get the gun advocates banging on about how people in Europe get stabbed because we don't have guns to protect ourselves.

Knife homicides in 2020.
England & Wales: 0.48 per 100,000
USA: 0.54 per 100,000.

Right so that argument gone then.

It's madness.

I don't know who this man is but he is spot on

[1964white]

We live in a crazy world, Cjay