This week's roundup of Dallas news includes items about a new acronym STR, also gun control, and millions of dollars in damage done to fine art.

Here's what happened in Dallas this week:

Curing STRs
It stands for Short Term Rentals, and it's a practice that's growing exponentially around Dallas and having a negative impact on neighborhoods.

The city council debated how to handle them at their June 1 meeting, especially how city would enforce rules and deal with the problems, since code compliance would be ill equipped to go out and stop a massive party. There was also tippy-toeing around the rights of property owners to have them.

Banning them entirely would be a good idea but the cat is sort of already out of the bag, in that an estimated 5,000 short-term rentals have cropped up in the past three years (although only 1,200 have registered with the city).

It's gotten worse recently because of Dallas' hot-hot real estate market, with absentee investors buying properties to use them as short-term rentals since Dallas currently has no regulations.

Short-term rentals are not good, especially in residential neighborhoods, because you have people coming in and out who have no ties to the area. At worst, they're being used for parties and other disruptive purposes.

Solutions included charging a fee; restricting them to only owner-occupied properties; and/or restricting them in residential neighborhoods entirely. A proposal is slated to be submitted to the city council on June 15, but it'll be at least September before anything can be done.

It's the guns
Following the May 24 mass shooting in Uvalde which killed 21 and injured 17 students and teachers, religious groups rallied outside the Dallas office of Sen. John Cornyn, trying to persuade him to reduce access to assault rifles.

Pastors from around the state shared four demands: passing universal background checks, launching better mental health care, funding community violence intervention strategies, and banning assault weapons and ghost guns.

DMA damage
A 21-year-old man is accused of breaking into the Dallas Museum of Art and causing more than $5 million in damages to irreplaceable artwork. He told the police he broke in and caused damage because he got mad at his girlfriend.

The arresting document said the guy smashed the museum's glass front entrance with a metal chair at about 9:40 pm, then intentionally damaged or destroyed $5,153,000 worth of artwork including several pots and statues that were centuries old.

Four ceramic items were smashed and some smaller pieces in the same display cases may have suffered minor damages, according to a DMA statement. They included a Greek vase, a Greek box, a Greek drinking cup, and a 2018 effigy bottle by artist Chase Kahwinhut Earles, a member of the Caddo Nation.