Other cities have major-league sports teams for distraction and entertainment. Las Vegas has Clark County Commissioner Tom Collins (D). The latter has been much in the headlines of late. First, per the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Collins was “was drinking and shooting on his North Las Vegas property on the night of July 3″ … because nothing mixes quite so well with alcohol as live ammo and firearms. This peccadillo that didn’t make news until Aug. 15, when double-barreled misdemeanor charges surfaced. A bit fired up — and more than a little liquored up — from Independence Day celebrations, Collins did what any reasonable person would after consuming several cams of Coors and a bottle of whiskey: He took a chain saw to a cedar tree in the dark of night and — when the arbor proved recalcitrant — he busted a cap in its ass. Seven, actually, and a nearby post also sustained flesh wounds. “Allegedly,” y’know. Given their neighbor’s volatility, several witnesses understandably refused to give testimony. The cops did confiscate Collins’ pistol which, perhaps in emulation of the commissioner himself, was loaded.
North LV residents already had reason to be nervous, what with rampaging chimpanzees having gotten out and about not once, but twice. (The survivor was subsequently exiled to Oregon.) Well, ol’ Tom musta thought, “I’ll see you those chimps and raise you some livestock, pardner.” On Aug. 17, a bull and cow busted loose from Collins’ North Las Vegas compound and the male roamed the neighborhood for the better part of three hours before being sedated by the constabulary — and not until the bull sent an incautious woman to the hospital with injuries. (Perhaps the beeves were lonely … Collins was off in Utah at the time.) This latest Collins misfeasance earned him a citation for “livestock at large,” although he tried to laugh it off as “a cowgirl event” and blame the victim. Please, Commissioner, we’d don’t need to know about your preferred sexual positions, sir.
All this excitement inspired John L. Smith to one of his nonpareil flights of punditry: “I’m wondering if the 62-year-old Collins [left] hasn’t wandered off the reality ranch and gotten trapped in a rodeo wrangler fantasy … I was startled to read that discharging a firearm in North Las Vegas is a crime. With so much gunfire echoing through the streets, who knew it was a municipal infraction? … How refreshing and quaint. How positively Mayberry, R.F.D. Students of local history know that traditionally Clark County commissioners bypass misdemeanors and go directly to federal public corruption felonies. Around here they don’t just make headlines: They make U.S. Post Office walls, wrote Smith in prose worth of Mark Twain himself.
However, as Smith pertinently noted, rampant livestock and midnight shooting sprees are petty infractions on the Collins Scale. The writer recalled the time to “juice” Las Vegas Paving into an extremely munificent civic contract. After a local judge took exception to Collins’ strong-arm tactics, Las Vegas Paving slipped a $36K gratuity into Collins’ defense fund. That’s Clark County for you: a place where the trees live in fear and it’s an unwise county commissioner who doesn’t have a legal-defense fund at the ready.
By the way, none of these antics have jeopardized Collins’ chances of another term in office. Out here we like our public officials drunk and stupid, preferably with a slice of adultery on the side. There may be those who wistfully recall the monkeyshines, rampant cronyism and verbal imbecilities of ex-governor “Midnight Jim” Gibbons. If so, I nominate Tom Collins as Nevada‘s new poster boy of Silver State stupidity.
Not so amusing. Stooping to an all-time low, discredited, defrocked and delusional ex-publisher Sherman Frederick defends that which is indefensible: rape.
