One day in September 2020, Dylan Russell walked into Bennington Armory, a gun shop in southern Vermont. The quirky store had opened four years earlier, in 2016, promoting antique guns and war memorabilia as its specialties. Charlie Jewett, one of the owners, had gotten his first gun when he was 5 — a 410 shotgun given to him by his grandfather — and he later regularly competed in small-bore rifle shooting contests organized by the National Rifle Association. He'd chosen to come to Vermont from New York in 2016, in part because he considered New York's restrictive gun laws crazy. "Vermont has the best gun laws in the country," Jewett told the Bennington Banner newspaper shortly after the shop opened. "Yes, they lean to the left, but they also want to be left alone. Freedom seems to be paramount. It's just a different feel here. I feel free." Russell, 23, wasn't at the Armory for antique guns or war memorabilia. He was interested in semiautomatic handguns, and the Armory stocked those, as well. Russell, who had grown up in and around Bennington, met Vermont's minimal requirements for buying a gun: He was of age and had no felony convictions. He wound up buying a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol. A week later, Russell was back in the shop, this time purchasing a Kahr PM9 9mm handgun, a weapon its manufacturer markets as "a high-quality, extremely accurate, and easily concealable pistol." Less than three months after that, on December 10, Russell again came through the doors of the Armory, walking out with a Stoeger STR-9 9mm. Russell's buying spree was hardly over. On December 12, 48 hours after his latest purchase at the Armory, Russell went to Black Dog Guns and Shooting Supplies store in Rutland, some 50 miles away, and bought a pair of Glock pistols. In all, from September 2020 to March 2022, Russell bought at least 15 handguns, including 10 from Bennington Armory. "Dylan Russell passed all his federal background checks," Jewett, the owner of the Armory, said in an interview. However, Russell was more than just an enthusiastic purchaser of semiautomatic pistols. According to federal prosecutors, he was a shadowy soldier in a criminal enterprise meant to exploit two features of life in the state of Vermont: its gun laws and its deadly struggle with opioid addiction. The authorities believe none of…