A tip to Atrios for this one.
...Someone was screaming from the parking lot of the gas station, and I turned around to find a middle aged man and woman beckoning to us. Their minivan was parked right behind our car, effectively parking us in, as it were, but at the time I thought that maybe they'd accidentally bumped into our car. I began to cross the parking lot, still not entirely able to make out what they were saying, and then... Convinced that we had taken photographs of their teenaged sons, this couple had tracked us down and they were not leaving without our camera. I refused to hand it over. At this point, the woman opened the door of the minivan, pointed to a backseat, said that she had her gun right there, and we were not leaving until the police arrived. A hostile mob was beginning to gather, spurred by phone calls and the couple's loud insistence that they were just trying to protect "the kids" without having actually witnessed a crime or presented any tangible evidence of actual wrongdoing.
I spent the next forty minutes crying, shaking, and begging in every way possible for everyone to calm down. With no cell phone reception, and under threat of being beaten or shot if I tried to go into the store and use a landline, I nervously sent text after text, silently praying that somehow, against all odds, something would go through so my mother would know where I was and wouldn't spend weeks not knowing what had happened to her children.
This is what happened to a brother and sister traveling cross country, working on a documentary. They were traveling with stops for taking photos and talking to people when this incident took place. Apparently, driving the 'wrong' kind of car from the 'wrong ' state is enough to freak some people out.
Read the whole thing - it sounds like a classic B movie small town horror story. Just
a small town, filled with real 'Muricans, their guns and their paranoia...
WTF is happening to this country? Is this what 'normal' is getting to be? Is this just a chance encounter with a few atypical people, or is the spirit of lynch law still alive and well? Think anyone will go in and try to unravel what happened here, find out how close this came to becoming a real tragedy? Does this have anything to do with the deliberate 'politics of division', or is this just the way things have always been?
If you click through to the link about this, you'll find local news video, with audio from the incident. http://www.wvva.com/...
And... http://www.wvva.com/...