Real grassroots; tree grooming; low fuel prices

Real grassroots

Sadly the Star-Telegram has fumbled the ball yet again, picking up a propaganda piece Jan. 3 from The New York Times about so-called “gun safety.”

The grassroots movement on this issue is dominated by the pro-2nd Amendment side.

State-level gun control initiatives like I-594 in Washington are bankrolled by billionaires who want ordinary citizens disarmed.

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg alone outspent the NRA in this assault on the 2nd Amendment.

This incoherent 18-page “gun safety” legislation criminalizes normal gun range occurrences like lending your firearm to a friend or family member, or even more absurd, lending your firearm to a family member for self-defense!

And like most ill-conceived gun control measures, I-594 seeks to punish the law-abiding. Thugs and criminals will not comply.

In November, the real grassroots — the electorate — mobilized to fire many gun-control Democrats from office.

Let’s stop portraying the gun control crowd (”gun safety” is practiced by responsible gun owners) to your readership as a home-grown movement.

It is another veiled effort by progressive elitists to decide what’s best for the American people.

Must be that we’re too stupid to know better. Sound familiar?

— Steve Kilborn, Fort Worth

Tree grooming

I am getting worried about Neil Sperry.

In his diatribe vis-a-vis owners of crape myrtles who chose to do with them whatever they wish (see: “Same Song, 40th verse” on Saturday, Jan. 3), he speaks as though he is about to declare that he is the perpetrator of a new organization called “The Ethical Treatment of Crape Myrtles,” a group that would cruise neighborhoods looking for plants that offend his sensitivities, take photos of the poor things, and tweet them about with detailed directions to the locations of those poor, mistreated things.

I have in my gardening library a few of Sperry’s books. My garden, with some “brutally chop-topped” crape myrtles, has even been featured in the Star-Telegram.

One of its fairly prominent elements is a circular bed of seasonally groomed crape myrtles that puts on an ever-blooming summer display of red, white and blue (purple), an idea I borrowed from our own botanic garden, and which technique appears in some of our nation’s finest gardens.

Now as to Sperry’s books, his curious — the word “pathological” comes to mind — fascination with, and animosity toward, a mere off-season vegetative grooming technique has me wondering if anything in those books is of merit.

— B. R. Hamlin, Fort Worth

Low fuel prices

Low fuel prices are good for Texas and good for railroads that deliver fuel to almost every industrial site and every city in the nation.

Consider the picture of the BNSF diesel/electric locomotives hauling 100 tanker cars of fuel. Locomotives might burn one carload of fuel to haul the other 99 carloads.

Also consider the future (about three years from now) when the locomotive engine is burning one carload of LNG and hauling 99 carloads of clean American LNG to wherever work needs doing.

One thing that crude oil bulls forget is that the U.S. transportation and fuel/chemical manufacturing networks are collocated with transmission lines carrying virtually free electrical energy from Amarillo to Beaumont.

If the Saudi desert sheiks think they can prevail against the Texas Railroad Commission, they better think again.

— Jack Farrell, Jacksonville, Fla.

This story was originally published January 7, 2015 at 5:47 PM with the headline "Real grassroots; tree grooming; low fuel prices."