90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Inside the Government’s Push to Regulate Short-Term Rental Industry Like Airbnb

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—Every day, the sun sets on the shoreline here, creating beautiful views that tourists from around the world flock to see.

To enjoy this experience, typically vacationers would have to pay for a hotel costing upwards of $400 a night—or they can try a new option in the so-called “sharing” economy.

Home-sharing websites like Airbnb allow homeowners and apartment dwellers to rent their home and spare bedrooms to vacationers for a fraction of the cost of a hotel stay.

But on May 12, the Santa Monica City Council passed a new ordinance that will impose regulations that make that opportunity much harder to come by.

“Santa Monica City Council is really at war with its own citizens on this matter,” said James Gattuso, a senior research fellow in regulatory policy at The Heritage Foundation.

“Airbnb is a service that is very popular with owners, very popular with visitors—it serves a need on both sides,” Gattuso said. “A lot of residents in Santa Monica want to use Airbnb in order to...

The UK used 49 million tonnes of coal in 2014 according to Carbon Brief estimates. That’s more than a 20 per cent reduction compared to the previous year, and the joint lowest coal use in records going back to the 1850s. Only 2009, when the country was in the depths of the financial crisis, had equally low coal consumption.

Girls With Guns

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CDC Gun Research Backfires on Obama

In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, President Obama issued a list of Executive Orders. Notably among them, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was given $10 million to research gun violence.

“Year after year, those who oppose even modest gun-safety measures have threatened to defund scientific or medical research into the causes of gun violence, I will direct the Centers for Disease Control to go ahead and study the best ways to reduce it,” Obama said on Jan. 16.

As a result, a 1996 Congressional ban on research by the CDC “to advocate or promote gun control” was lifted. Finally, anti-gun proponents—and presumably the Obama Administration—thought gun owners and the NRA would be met with irrefutable scientific evidence to support why guns make Americans less safe.

Mainstream media outlets praised the order to lift the ban and lambasted the NRA and Congress for having put it in place.

It was the “Executive Order the NRA Should Fear the Most,” according to The Atlantic.

The CDC ban on gun research “caused lasting damage,” reported ABC News.

Salon said the ban was part of the NRA’s “war on gun science.”

And CBS News lamented that the NRA “stymied” CDC research.

Most mainstream journalists argued the NRA’s opposition to CDC gun research demonstrated its fear of being contradicted by science; few—if any—cited why the NRA may have had legitimate concerns. The culture of the CDC at the time could hardly be described as lacking bias on firearms.

“We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes,” Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who oversaw CDC gun research, told The Washington Post in 1994. “Now [smoking] is dirty, deadly and banned.”

Does Rosenberg sound like a man who should be trusted to conduct taxpayer-funded studies on guns?

Rosenberg’s statement coincided with a CDC study by Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay, who argued guns in the home are 43 times more likely to be used to kill a family member than an intruder. The study had serious flaws; namely, it skewed the ratio by failing to consider defensive uses of firearms in which the intruder wasn’t killed. It has since been refuted by several studies, including one by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, indicating Americans use guns for self-defense 2.5 million times annually. However, the damage had been done—the “43 times” myth is perhaps gun-control advocates’ most commonly cited argument, and a lot of people still believe it to this day.

So, the NRA and Congress took action. But with the ban lifted, what does the CDC’s first major gun research in 17 years reveal? Not exactly what Obama and anti-gun advocates expected. In fact...

Read More HERE