Who Really Stands with Terrorists? (The Last Word).(regulation of firearms industry as part of terrorism prevention efforts)(Brief Article)

Al-Qaeda terrorist Ziad Jarrahi, who was among the hijackers of United Flight 93, cynically used America's freedoms to acquire military-caliber training that he later used in an attempt to kill hundreds of Americans. While living as a "sleeper" agent in Florida, Jarrahi enrolled in a "street fighting" course taught by Bert Rodriguez, a master of eight separate martial arts disciplines. According to Black Belt magazine, it was Rodriguez's "experience in teaching military personnel" that attracted the attention of the prospective terrorist.

Since Black Tuesday, Rodriguez has tried to be more careful in selecting and training students. But surely more must be done to address the menace of unregulated martial arts training! We need sensible martial arts laws that will prevent such deadly skills from being shared with terrorists and extremists. Instructors like Rodriguez must be subject to federal registration, background checks, and licensing. And they should face severe civil penalties should any of their students make use of the skills they have been taught to kill or injure other human beings.

Martial artists who profit from offering instruction in "assault arts" have a very simple decision to make: Do they stand with America, or with the terrorists?

Such an ultimatum is ludicrous. But Tom Diaz, a former CIA agent who now flacks for a foundation-funded anti-gun lobby called the Violence Policy Center (VPC), has embraced essentially the same view regarding the firearms industry. Pointing to al-Qaeda training materials that urge terrorist cadres to buy firearms and join shooting clubs in the United States, Diaz and the VPC insist that tighter controls must be imposed upon American gun owners and dealers. "This chilling new information presents the NRA and its gun-industry cohorts with a stark choice: Support America or support terror," intones Diaz.

Diaz's audacity is quite remarkable, given that he, like Osama bin Laden, was once on the CIA's payroll. The tens of millions of law-abiding American gun owners, manufacturers, and dealers whom Diaz casually maligns have never aided or abetted bin Laden's terrorist campaign. The same cannot be said of Diaz's erstwhile comrades at the CIA, who lavished monetary and material benefactions upon bin Laden and the most anti-American elements of the Afghan Mujahadeen -- thereby creating the nucleus of what would eventually become the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

The VPC, seeking to exploit Black Tuesday, recently released a hysterical report claiming to illustrate how the firearms industry is responsible for arming bin Laden and various other malefactors with 50 caliber sniper rifles. One key ...