The lottery response

This was a very interesting story.  After reading the first few lines I remembered I had read this story before and excited to hear it again.  The whole idea of the story is a little disturbed.  Randomly picking one person to be stoned for no apparent reason seems very ridiculous.  I don't know when or where this story takes place but it seems to be in the colonial period, if it even takes place in America.  It seemed the town people didn't even care that they were going to kill someone; even Mrs. Hutchinson's son and daughter made a joke of it to to the crowd when they found out it wasn't going to be them.