But the sociologist James William Gibson, whose book “Warrior Dreams” analyzed civilian paramilitary culture since the mid-’70s, says Appleseed and the broader movement around it are unlikely to pose a danger to civil society. “When a culture is in crisis, the first response is often to go back to the creation myth and start over again,” he told me. “The narrative is ‘we’re going to redo the narrative of the United States by returning to origins, to marksmanship.’ People are focusing on the idea that America’s problems can be resolved into something that can be shot. It doesn’t exactly encourage systematic reflection, but it’s a long ways from a civil war.”

The National Rifle Association declined to address the question of where Appleseed fits into the gun culture. “We are familiar with who they are and what they do,” a spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam, told me. “But given that we don’t have firsthand experience, we are reticent to say anything beyond that.” Maynard Reid Jr., the sheriff of Randolph County in North Carolina, which includes the Ramseur range, told me he hadn’t heard of the Appleseed Project, though he sometimes rents the range from Dailey for sniper training. “Jack Dailey is a straightforward guy,” he told me. “He don’t try to sugarcoat things. He’s a good man, as far as I know.”

Appleseed’s claim to mainstream legitimacy is bolstered by the group’s ties to active-duty members of the military. In March, an instructor who works as a researcher at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico arranged for Appleseed to conduct five days of training with a brigade from the Second Engineer Battalion. Appleseed also gave free on-base training to a unit from the South Carolina National Guard. I shot at Appleseed boot camps alongside Marines looking to hone their skills before deployment. They came to Appleseed out of uniform, on their own accord. The final two days of the Ramseur boot camp were led by 26-year-old John Hawes, who won a Silver Star in Afghanistan and recently taught marksmanship to soldiers at Fort Jackson. “The Army’s gotten away from the basics,” he told me.

On one of the final afternoons of boot camp, Gordon Wade, a math professor at Bowling Green State University, was cooking outside his tent. Dailey lumbered up and told Wade he had the makings of a good instructor. Wade said he wasn’t sure how many of his academic peers he could bring into the Appleseed fold. “They might think it’s some kind of militia,” he said.

The men stood in silence. Wade stirred his dinner. “A man should have a rifle,” he said. “Not just a .22. A man should have an AR-15 the same way he should have one good suit. Now, I can’t really think of a scenario where I’m going to use my AR-15 as an AR-15. I can’t quite articulate it. It sounds like I want to go out fighting zombies” — slang for the unprepared — “or feds. I don’t want to. But if it ever comes to that, God forbid, I want to be able to. But no, no. . . .” He shook his head. “That isn’t it either. It’s just something that I think I should have. Fred, why should I have an AR-15?”

Dailey stood with his arms crossed. He said: “Because they want to tell us what to do. And we don’t want them to tell us what to do.”

Dailey keeps his rifle stocks in an old Coca-Cola warehouse filled to the rafters with the remainders of war — empty bandoleers, rifle slings, rifle butt plates, rifle brushes, rifle grease. Thousands of wooden stocks stripped of their actions lay in jumbled piles. Dailey fired his first gun at age 6, a .22 aimed at a tree stump. He pulled the trigger; his father held the stock. His first rifle was a Japanese Model 99, a present from his mother for his 19th birthday. The physical fact of the gun led him to consider what action it might have seen. “The joy of owning these things is tough to explain,” he says. “Either you feel it or you don’t.” In the Army R.O.T.C. at North Carolina State University, he learned to fire and strip an M1 Garand. Academic deferments kept him out of Vietnam. In 1969, he took a bus to Washington to march against the war. “I thought this was a serious thing,” he says. “Everyone else was there to party.” He gave up his activist stirrings for law school, married, graduated and began rehabbing apartment buildings in Chicago. He did well enough to retire at 42, but the experience eroded his idealism. “A landlord is like a cop or a bartender,” he says. “You get to see people as they really are.” His politics moved toward “the iron rule of life: everyone wants to be first in line to eat and last in line to die.” The economic malaise of the late 1970s seemed to confirm this pessimism. He sought comfort in survivalist magazines and stockpiled rifles and canned food. In the mid-1980s, he sold off his properties and moved with his wife back to North Carolina.