Nice area to visit when a kid, my Dad’s family was from Republic.
Now I don’t know, haven’t been down there since 2005.
It is still beautiful country. Rolling hills and woods, rhodedendron along clear trout streams. Most of the people are the salt of the Earth.
But here and there are thieving, stinking hoofs who think they have the right to take your stuff and who will shoot your dog and burn your house if you object. Always have been since the first settlers crossed the Alleghenies.
The saving grace is that every so often they get a little mountain justice. It was on those rare, blessed occasions when someone decided to commit a hot burglary of an inhabited dwelling, and found themselves on the receiving end of a load of up close and personal 00 buck, that I was proud, as a member of the constabulary, to mark the case file ‘justified’ and closed.
Second Amendment in action. Thus endeth the lesson.