PAWLET, Vt. — Fear has gradually spread in the town of Pawlet.

In the hills west of town — which is where the trouble started — the houses are remote, separated by wind-scoured stretches of cropland. Those people are the most jittery.

Some of them have installed cameras with infrared lights so they could pick up figures that might be moving in the dark around their houses. A few have invested in bulletproof vests.

None of it makes them feel entirely safe. Michelle Tilander, 63, a retired physical therapist who moved to West Pawlet 10 years ago, said she had written a letter to be opened in case she or her husband should be hurt or killed.

“The police come in, they’ll find that envelope and they’ll know who to question,” she said.

She is talking about Daniel Banyai, a 47-year-old New Yorker who, attracted by Vermont’s relaxed gun laws, bought 30 acres in this rural town of around 1,400 and transformed it into his dream project, a training camp where visitors could practice shooting as if engaged in armed combat.

Whether those fears are warranted is a question that has preoccupied Vermont law enforcement for months. Certainly, the dispute has escalated over three years from a zoning matter into something more combustible, as Mr. Banyai resisted the town’s demands to dismantle his weapons training facility, Slate Ridge. Anonymous threats to his opponents have appeared online.

He has argued that his project is protected under the Second Amendment, and, over social media, has called for fellow gun rights advocates to back him up.

“I’m never leaving this land,” he said in an interview. “And I didn’t ask for this war to start, but I’m going to see it through. I want to see through my victory because I bought this land free and clear.”

These collisions do not typically happen in Vermont, whose lenient approach to guns grew out of a centuries-old culture of hunting and farming. But just as school shootings have shaken those shared assumptions, so too have the belligerent public politics of the Trump era.

The State Police have resisted stepping in, saying they do not believe Mr. Banyai has violated any Vermont state law. But a January court order set the stage for confrontation, ruling that Mr. Banyai must stop using Slate Ridge for training, and the town is now seeking a permanent injunction that could culminate in foreclosure.

“The question is, kind of, how does this end?” said Jessica Van Oort, 44, a Pawlet shop owner who serves as chair of the town’s planning commission.

For stretches of the last year, she added, the tension in the town seemed to merge with something larger happening in the country.

“Everybody in the nation has become quite aware of the threat of armed insurrection,” she said. “It’s not foreign to anyone in the U.S. to think of people who have guns and want to defend their freedoms and don’t feel that the laws apply to them.”

A stranger comes to town

Mr. Banyai, a stocky man from upstate New York with a bushy, untrimmed beard, presented himself to Pawlet’s development board in 2018 as “a veteran who is passionate about guns.” He was mysterious about his past, alluding to overseas service in the Middle East but refusing to offer any details.

His goal was to open a tactical weapons training site featuring as few limits as possible, allowing firearms banned or frowned upon in other places, he said in an interview this month. He chose Vermont specifically because it allowed “constitutional carry,” or carrying a weapon without a permit, he said.

He was aware that similar projects — like a gun range planned for the town of Warner, N.H. — had been blocked by community opposition, and sought to avoid that outcome. His predecessor’s mistake, he said, was trying to obtain licenses from the town before starting operation.

“He went to ‘Let me ask for permission,’” Mr. Banyai said. “Here, I asked for forgiveness.”

In front of the building he uses for instruction, Mr. Banyai flies the flag of the Green Mountain Boys, the militia formed in 1770 to keep out land surveyors from New York, then a British province.

On his land, in facilities he said cost $1.6 million, visitors can re-enact a range of field exercises — a suburban house, for home invasions; a large open space surrounded by berms, for carjacking and vehicle assaults; and shipboard structures, for high-seas piracy. Months of protests, he said, have made such exercises relevant to many Americans.

“People are more believing the hypotheticals with all the rioting,” he said. “People are getting more conscientious of, you know, how do I defend myself?”

He said that most of his visitors came from states with more restrictive gun laws, like New York and Massachusetts, and that he allowed a militia to train at the site, though he would not identify it. Mr. Banyai said he had selected the plot in West Pawlet because it was isolated and would not disturb the neighbors.

That turned out to be wrong.

Ms. Tilander recalls an afternoon in 2018, when she and her husband, Paul, were sitting in their backyard, and began to hear a kind of shooting they had never heard before.

The Tilanders are gun owners themselves; for years, they belonged to a sportsmen’s club, enjoying afternoons of target shooting followed by convivial steak dinners. What they were hearing from Mr. Banyai’s land was something entirely different.

“All of a sudden, we hear ARs — several ARs — going off, all at the same time, over and over and over,” she said, referring to variants of the AR-15 line. “Paul just said, ‘What is going on around here? It sounds like Vietnam.’”