Jane A. Karas, a former New Yorker who is the college’s president, said the program “focuses on craftsmanship that maintains the historic values” of the area. Her colleague Susan Burch, who worked with a transplanted Oklahoma gunsmith, Brandon Miller, to teach the course, added, “You’re looking at the intersection of art and the outdoors.”

Homicides with guns are relatively rare in the area. There have been three in Kalispell, a city of 20,000 people, out of six murders total in the past 12 years, said Roger Nasset, the local police chief. His officers are never surprised to find a gun inside a car they stop for a traffic violation — and seldom bother to discuss it, much less confiscate it. Montana’s laws on gun possession are among the least restrictive in the nation.

Guns are not permitted in schoolrooms, but the weapons have been used to raise money for education. Last fall, Stillwater Christian School received more than $20,000 when its parent-teacher organization held a raffle for a locally made semiautomatic AR-15 rifle donated by Mr. Walker, a parent of two young students there.

“When we did the fund-raiser, it didn’t cross my mind, ‘Wow, we’re donating an assault rifle to a school for a fund-raiser,’ ” he said. “It was just, ‘This is one of the No. 1-selling rifles in America.’ ”

Butch Hurlbert, whose daughter and teenage granddaughter were murdered with a gun near Kalispell on Dec. 25, 2010, blames the killer — his daughter’s former boyfriend — and the police, not the gun. Having a gun, he said, “is pretty much just a normal thing.”