Small town violence

There was Bad Day at Black Rock, of course, pretty much a wide screen Technicolor film noir set in a tiny Nevada town. Seem like small towns have an untapped action movie potential. They often have higher murder rates than cities. In cities, you're more apt to be killed by someone who is robbing or raping you, or you might be murdered at random. In small towns, you're more likely to killed by someone you know who thinks you've insulted them in some way.

I worked with a couple of small town dwellers. One had been a witness in a murder case--one of his friends killed a man because he took a completely innocent snapshot of his sister. He and his stepfather are still in prison. The other knew an alcoholic 19-year-old who tried to murder his mother's boyfriend for being his mother's boyfriend. The man suffered a serious head injury and brain damage, but survived.

They tend to have more guns in small towns, everyone knows each other to some degree. A lot of towns have the same number of people as fairly typical high school----a high school where everyone has a couple of guns and will kill you if you offend them in any way. Might be able to remake a samurai movie in that setting.

The was the story of Ken McElroy who terrorized the tiny town of Skidmore, Missouri. It's surprising it took the townsfolk so long to finally shoot him. After he was dead, his widow filed a lawsuit against them so they burned her house down. Seems strange that people willing to burn down a person's house would have been so cowed for so long by a guy they could easily pick off with a rifle.

My mother's entire extended family came from a small town, but they're all gone from there now. The younger ones moved away and the older ones have died off. In that town, two brothers (unrelated to me as far as I know) got into an argument about something so one murdered the other with a homemade sword.

An elderly local minister thought that his church and the several businesses he owned were an independent country and that he wasn't required to pay taxes. I can understand some idiot thinking that his property SHOULD be an independent country and that he shouldn't have to pay taxes, but I can't imagine even the stupidest person thinking they could successfully argue this in court. He and his wife tried. They're both in prison.

I walked into a little restaurant there. They had a wall plastered with right wing Tea Party stuff, much of it explicitly racist.

Forty-five years ago, I was there walking around with my brother and our cousin. There was a rowboat sitting next to the river. For some reason, my brother desperately wanted to take the boat out onto the river. My cousin refused not because doing so would be theft, but because the guy who owned it was from a family known for physical violence.