Chalet 1802 - Chamonix-Mont-Blanc

Less than 5% of police officers in England and Wales carry guns. Hardly any guns are ever shot, and cases of fatal shootings by police are infinitely fewer. There are only 7,000 firearms officers in the UK out of a force of 140,000. Police officers with guns are rarely seen.To the Americans, or perhaps the French, having a nation policed with men and woman armed with only a baton may seem incredulous.

Which make the police shooting in Chamonix last week seem all the more bizarre. Three men from Lyon were disturbed whilst in the process of robbing a chalet in Chamonix. They fled the scene and the owner’s daughter called the police.

The robbers ignored police instructions to stop and forced their way through a police barricade near the golf course in Les Tines. The police opened fire and shot two bullets into the driver’s side of the vehicle.

Photo courtesy of the Dauphine Libre

All very exciting, I’m sure. But was it really reasonable force by the police? There is only one road that runs out of the valley to Switzerland, and that has a boarder crossing. Surely it couldn’t have been too difficult to follow the vehicle, police helicopters had been deployed, until the car was either stopped at the border or another road block could be set up.

In the UK the police were found not without fault in the shooting of an armed but deranged lawyer, but he was armed. And looking at the bullet holes in the vehicle in Chamonix it certainly doesn’t look like the police were firing warning shots.

So if you see a road block in Chamonix the best advice is to slow down and stop.

The Farmhouse has recently been featured in Images Magazine. Probably not a title too widely read outside of the Alps. It’s about Alpine interior design and is in Italian and French, so a fairly niche market about aline accommodation.

Nevertheless The Farmhouse did make it.

This week members of the International Olympic Committee are visiting the proposed sites of the Annecy Winter Olympics 2018.

Image via Wikipedia

Chamonix is the proposed site of the ice hockey, and in Les Houches we’d have all the alpine skiing events. It would be a major boon for the area, and voting takes place in Durban on July 6th.

Unfortunately the French bid has been plagued with internicine warfare recently, but the South Koreans have come pretty close to actual warfare so it looks like it could be between Annecy and Munich. (Do they actually have mountains in Germany?).

Related articles

• Annecy delivers official bid documents to host 2018 Games (thestar.com)
• French 2018 Olympic bid chief quits (theglobeandmail.com)
• Annecy 2018 bid will fight on, says French IOC member (reuters.com)

With the recent lack of snow in the alps what better to do than hit the park? Luckily Les Houches has a belter this year thanks to the DC boys. Certainly worth checking out.