Kentucky Judge Steven D. Combs in Pike County has been temporarily suspended after an array of charges of bizarre comments and actions, including calling officials such names as “Fishface,” “cokehead,” and “Dumbo.” Worst yet, he threatened to put a “bullet in the head” of the next police officer who pulled him over. A temporary suspension until resolution of the 10 charges seems quite modest punishment but his counsel, Stephen Ryan, still conveyed Combs’ “disappointment” with the action taken by the Judicial Conduct Commission.
The complaint detailed Combs use of various, less-than-flattering ways of referring to other people like “Fishface,” “cokehead,” “dumbo,” “retarded,” “coward” and “prick. ” — use of those words has led to the temporary suspension of a Pike County circuit judge.
Combs is accused of conflicts of interest in cases, inappropriate communications, inappropriate political activity, soliciting contributions from attorneys in cases before him, and other violations. One of the most interesting is that he allegedly made inappropriate statements on the gossip website Topix under usernames including “LOL,” “Better Call Wusty,” “Imma Tellinyou,” and “City Hall Patrol.”
That last allegation is problematic and goes again to the right of public employees to engage in social media, particularly when using an alias.
One of the worst charges concerns the alleged statement of Combs that the next officer who pulled him over would get a “bullet in the head.” When confronted by police over the statement, he allegedly replied “I’m elected by the people and not pieces of trash like you-all.”
Combs, who has been a judge since 2003, is paid $124,620 annually.
There is no clear, overwhelming consensus in America that more gun control legislation is desirable or effective. The doubts that I previously shared re the effectiveness of the massive amount of gun control legislation are shared by many Americans.
My best guess is that there is roughly a 50-50 split as to the need or desirability of more legislation.
It is extremely difficult to amend the U.S. constitution without overwhelming support for an amendment. As a practical matter, that option is off the table.
Addition legislation may pass (or not pass) in certain jurisdictions, with “Blue states” probably more likely to pass additional gun control laws.
As I stated before, I am more interested in serious discussions about what will actually work, and what doesn’t work, in reducing gun- related violence.
The belief that America would repeal or alter the 2nd Amendment is totally unrealistic. The belief that gun -related violence is increasing is factually incorrect.
As I see it, we are best served by a realistic look at what has worked, what has not worked, and what might actually work. I see damn little of that; there are instead broad philosophical statesments or totally unrealistic proposals.
Dr. Peckitt, they don’t care. They love their guns more.
USA Today: Costs to the Nation of Gunshot Wounds
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/04/gunshot-wounds-medicaid-insurance-costs/1956445/
Reference
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/194/total_number_of_gun_deaths
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun,” the NRA president, Wayne LaPierre, infamously declared after the Newtown shooting.
But according to the nonprofit Violence Policy Center, there were just 258 “justifiable homicides” involving civilians using guns in 2012, as opposed to 8,342 criminal homicides committed with a firearm. “For every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun or guns were used in 32 criminal homicides,” the group said in a report, which is based on data from the FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics.
And those figures do not even include an estimated 22,000 suicides and accidental shootings annually where guns are involved.
A pandemic is defined as “an epidemic occurring on a scale which crosses international boundaries, usually affecting a large number of people”.
I don’t propose to talk about cars alcohol, tobacco or any other diversionery subject. This blog relates to the Judge and his frustrated comments on shooting an imagined policeman.
In the United States you have a real problem with gun abuse that is definitely related to what has now become an American Psyche. The American Dream is now a Nightmare.
Sections of U.’S. Society remain in denial to the extent that your democratic process has been disabled by intent.
Attempts to address these issues cannot possibily be successful as stated by Tom Nash. This is secondary to the manipulation of the democratic process by those with vested commercial interests. This is the Achilles Heel.
The real problem is that there is a very vocal faction which sees nothing wrong in these tactics.
Theread has been no comprehensive debate to date; argumemts have been commercial driven rather than conducted on the bedrock of democratic process.
The United States continues to pay a heavy price for your Second Amendment and it should be your electorate to decide if this is a price worth paying.
ninianpeckitt – you have yet to show an abuse of guns, much less a pandemic. I have shown you that that deaths by guns are far down the list. I was in a pandemic, so I know what one is. You don’t.
Leaving aside The Supremes ruling on the right to own and bear arms, we are faced with the fact that there are hundreds of millions of firearms in America.
I have watch as a plethora of new gun control laws were past over the decades;the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK spurred more and more attempts to reduce gun violence.
In the more recent past, tragedies like Sandy Hook, Columbine, the church murders in South Carolina, etc. have kept the debate over gun control energized.
The gun control legislation I am familiar with seems to have been more effective at creating confusion and inconvenience, and not very effective at reducing gun violence.
Violence crimes involving firearms soared in the wake of the numerous new gun control laws in the 1960s. Crimes involving firearms have been steadily declining for over 20 years, despite a general lack of new gun control legislation ( as well as a rollback in some jurisdictions on restrictions in gun ownership and “carrying” firearms.
I realize that the factors I have cited above do not absolutely prove the general ineffectiveness of much of American gun control laws (I believe there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of laws related to firearms in the U.S.)
But at a minimum, those factors should spur some hard questions about what actually works, and what does not work, in attempts to prevent crimes involving firearms.
For example, many of the high-profile mass killing save involved perpetrators with serious mental health issues…most of whom legally obtained ownership or possession of the guns. Leaving the mental health aspect out of this debate is a huge mistake.
My interest is in seeing practical,specific suggestions that are actually effective. Unfortunately, the knee-jerk platitudes that both sides of this debate roll out after every Sandy Hook or Columbine or S. Carolina are generally worthless.
You tell me….
It’s not me you have to convince but your electorate and the victims of gun abuse and their families.
This is about what your judge said and its consequences. It is about gun abuse not responsible gun use, driving, tobacco, alcohol, or boring people to death.
It’s about why a President is blocked from introducing gun control within a democratuc process when there is a clear lobby for this that remains undebated at a Natipnal level. Its about why requests for debate promotote hystrionic responses from opponents rather than a will to debate. And it’s about the somewhat tarnished image of America at home and abroad.
A better standard of debate is required from Tom, Paul and all colleagues both pro and con as to why you don’t advocate a free vote on this issue and why an apparent Will of the Minority (if Isaac”s figures are accurate) prevails in the United States.
That’s what this is about.
ninianpeckett – far more people are killed by cars. Let’s start there.
I guess Tom is happy with the status quo and that must make him right. It is clear that other views are clearly out of bounds.
But there again who am I to comment? I am only a parent whose children haven’t been shot and more importantly have less chance of being shot.
What Tom thinks of me is unimportant and vice versa.
What matters is that the pandemic death rate from U.S. gun abuse is unacceptable and that a significant minority lobby in the USA ensures that no one can do anything about it.
You will have to draw your own conclusions as to whether this has contributed to the American Dream or an American Nightmare.
So the task for Tom and other colleagues is to destroy the argument against U.S. gun control through reasoned logic and then for the country to put it to a vote or maybe referendum.
If he is right his argument will prevail. Will this happen ?
Of course not….. because that would hand Power back to the People and Democracy would never allow that to happen.
ninianpeckitt –
How many are required for a pandemic? And what defines abuse? In 2013 (last year of record) 35,369 died in car accidents. 29,001 were killed by alcohol induced causes. 46,471 were killed by drug induced causes. 16,121 were murdered (all causes)
At times I have to remind myself of the dangers of generalization. For example, one could get the impression that all Canadian-French-Anglofile posters are arrogant, santimomious people dispensing psychobabble.
Isaac”s argument seems to confirm that the Will of the Majority cannot prevail in the United States.
Is not this a Constitutional Issue?
What has happened to American Democracy?
Has this become a figment of the imagination? Or did it never really exist in the first place?
It is claimed that Democracy was won in the American Revolution, and the fight for its survival must surely continue in the Senate and House of Representatives.
You cannot be a Leader of the Free World when you are “whacking” your population with such regularity.
In the UK, Scotland recently voted in a referendum to stay in the Union of the United Kingdom. We are now about to have a referendum to decide if we are to stay in the European Union.
What the World cannot understand is how a country like the United States can stand by whilst children are shot to death at school and mass killings of citizens is not an uncommon atrocity.
Is it really true that “nothing can be done”?
I cannot believe it.
Your democratic processes are only 300 years old and continue to evolve. You cannot do, in 300 years, what has taken other Nations, a millennium or more.
But there are some things worth dying for…. the legacy of Abraham Lincoln is a great example not just for the United States but for Everyone, Everywhere.
So maybe you will have to wait a while longer until the next Great Statesman emerges and can exert the influence required for the resurection of democratic principles?
And it may very well cost them their own Life…..
Ninian
It puzzles most Americans, who are logical, intelligent, and rational. Unfortunately the US is unlike Great Britain and most other more socially evolved countries. Enough Americans are religiously attached to a Daniel Boone, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, mentality that with the assistance of bought and paid for politicians, Americans are armed to the teeth. For what, as you ask, only a deranged person can answer and the two main answers seem to revolve around defense against other idiots armed to the teeth and G-Men breaking into one’s home in the late hours of the evening or early hours of the morning. The religious aspect of some god or Constitutionally given right, regardless of the differences between times and places of then and now, is the mainstay of the argument when the NRA gets involved. This organization of less than 5 million can make or break any elected official with unlimited funding for the most acerbic advertising campaigns. Typically some movie star like Charlton Heston or Tom Selleck, the real American men, advertise their right to die rather than give up their gun(s).
It doesn’t matter how one puts it. We are in so deep there is not much that one can do but call it what it is, stupid.
One of the most difficult things for the British to understand on our side of the Pond in the Love Affair of the American People and your constitutional Right to Bear Arms, which if I understand it correctly, is an amendment to your Constitution.
The inclusion of a Right to Bear Arms has its roots in the emotional overtones of resistance to an Oppressive Government and had evolved and been applied to Modern Society, which bears little resemblance to the Era of the Shot that was heard around the World.
You cannot use a pop gun to bring down a Mig even if it is prised from a “cold dead hand”. The Arming of the Masses mostly with small arms will not deter an Autocratic State armed to the teeth with sophisticated weaponry of the Land Sea and Air if it decides to target civilians.
The right to Bear Arms for self defence in an increasing violent Society has arisen from the Historical Basis of the Right to Bear Arms in the first place; and a change in gun culture has evolved as a process of a process of unnatural selection, within society, in which gun use and abuse is now an accepted feature of American Culture.
So you can see why, the British in particular, are puzzled as to why the Right to Bear Arms is such a sacred issue in the United States, especially when gun abuse is so common.
So why can’t this situation change in the United States? Whilst there is a Right to Bear Arms this does not necessarily equate with a right to use arms, especially in an abusive manner.
The Second Amendment (Amendment II) to the United States Constitution protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms and was adopted on December 15, 1791, as part of the first ten amendments contained in the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the right belongs to individuals, while also ruling that the right is not unlimited and does not prohibit all regulation of either firearms or similar devices.
State and local governments are limited to the same extent as the federal government from infringing this right per the incorporation of the Bill of Rights.
The Second Amendment was based partially on the right to keep and bear arms in English common-law and was influenced by the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Sir William Blackstone described this right as an “auxiliary right”, supporting the natural rights of self-defense, resistance to oppression, and the civic duty to act in concert in defence of the State.
In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that, “The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence” and limited the applicability of the Second Amendment to the federal government. In United States v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government and the states could limit any weapon types not having a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well- regulated militia”.
In the twenty-first century, the amendment has been subjected to renewed academic inquiry and judicial interest. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision, expressly holding the amendment to protect an individual right to possess and carry firearms. In McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Court clarified its earlier decisions that limited the amendment’s impact to a restriction on the federal government, expressly holding that the Fourteenth Amendment applies the Second Amendment to state and local governments to the same extent that the Second Amendment applies to the federal government. Despite these decisions, the debate between various organisations regarding gun control and gun rights continues.
So for those in the United States advocating gun control, it would appear that an amendment of an amendment to the Constitution is required? Or the amendment needs to be revoked or modernised to meet the needs of a modern American Society. Methinks that commercial pressures are to great to permit a changing of the status quo.
What puzzles the Rest of the World is why this issue cannot be tackled and why American Society accepts the consequences of this inaction, so eloquently expressed by the Kentucky Judge featured in this blog.
Mr. Schulte,
“Maybe free speech is just freer there than it is here.”
I’ve had several comments deleted. How is that free??? And it’s completely arbitrary when it does occur.
Hey he wants to kill cops so he is you kind of guy. What’s the problem?
Time for a rest.
This judge simply needs to “keep his cool” and remember he can have these officers in court for there wrong doing; because they would keep Harassing him. Judge keep your cool stay in charge. Officers Love to provoke and esculate most situation.
Shouldn’t the comments on the gossip site fall under whistleblower laws?
Maybe free speech is just freer there than it is here. And I think the threat against the cops is more of an idle threat, unless he carries heat. He must either be black or drive a red car, those are the only reasons to be pulled over a lot.
Let the people decide. If he is re-elected then the people have decided that his comments on Twitter, Facebook, uttBaybook or other media are acceptable. There is nothing wrong in calling a person who snorts coke a cokehead. He calls them as he sees them. Free speech– even in Kentucky.