I don't see the NPA as a personal security threat at all; if I did I wouldn't be here. Of course you're right; having a weapon in the house isn't going to do a whole lot of good if a dozen guys with assault rifles come calling. Only real threat is the possibility of crossfire or just loose rounds flying around, but there hasn't been fighting that close to town here since the early 90s. Main personal impact is that when these things happen there are places I can't go for a while, some trails become dodgy and the wilderness area north becomes a good place to stay out of.

For the town, it's a concern because they make a fair bit of money from tourism and having a bunch of soldiers around is not good for the tourist trade. It's also awkward for locals when they are out doing things they do in the mountains and run into military patrols; the questioning is often quite aggressive and threatening, and people don't like it.

The whole dynamic of insurgency in the Philippines is very different from place to place, even in places that are quite close together. In some ways you have to look at it as a bunch of micro-insurgencies, each with its own characteristics (I suspect that the same applies to many other cases of what is generally perceived as "national" insurgency). In this immediate neighborhood it's heavily influenced by the reality that the tribes really do have full control over their land and resources, and don't need to ally with the NPA to fight off unwanted central government intrusion (as they did in the 70s/80s). In Abra province, a day's walk north of us, it's quite different.

In the 12 years I've been here I haven't felt personally threatened by any of it, hasn't been more than mildly unsettling. If things went back to the way they were from late 80s to early 90s, we'd move.