Some neigh­bor­hoods grow flow­ers. Oth­ers grow gar­dens. And still oth­ers tend to a vir­u­lent crop: home­grown jihadists. Take John Allen Muham­mad for instance. Muham­mad is the noto­ri­ous DC sniper who mowed down at least 10 peo­ple in his path. He ter­ror­ized the greater part of DC, even turn­ing his .223-caliber Bush­mas­ter rifle (the civil­ian ver­sion of the mil­i­tary M-16) on school­yard chil­dren. But what do we really know about Muhammad?

The story may give you déjà vu. Muham­mad served in the Louisiana Army National Guard in 1978 and seven years later vol­un­teered for active ser­vice in the US army work­ing as a mechanic, truck dri­ver and spe­cial­ist met­al­worker. Just two years into his army ser­vice, Muham­mad joined the Nation of Islam in 1987.  Moham­mad soon qual­i­fied with the Army’s stan­dard infantry weapon, the M16, earn­ing the Expert Rifleman’s Badge. Guess what? The Army reserves this rat­ing as the high­est of three lev­els of marks­man­ship for a basic soldier.

At the time of Muhammad’s shoot­ing spree, he was iso­lated from his fam­ily, con­sid­ered a ‘loner’ and had adopted increas­ingly more mil­i­tant reli­gious beliefs.

Sound famil­iar? Hasan any­one? As we fight the war on ter­ror, we have an oblig­a­tion to con­trol the threat from within. We can no longer stay silent while we actively train Islamic Amer­i­cans to use our own train­ing against us. The most notable exam­ple of this is the Saudi ter­ror­ists who took up pilot train­ing in the US before turn­ing them­selves and our planes into human bombs.

Like the 911 ter­ror­ists, there is plenty of evi­dence link­ing Muham­mad and Hasan to jihad. Draw­ings by Muham­mad admit­ted that the killings were jihadist. Like­wise, Hasan emailed Anwar al-Awlaki, a Mus­lim cleric who had ties to the 9/11 ter­ror­ists. So how can we pre­vent home­grown jihadists in our midst? A buddy sys­tem that allows anony­mous report­ing to the high­est lev­els? Detain­ment of any­one remotely sus­pected of Jihadist under­pin­nings? A fail-proof sys­tem that results in an auto­matic court mar­tial for mil­i­tary per­son­nel who fail to detain sus­pected jihadists? It’s high time we all weigh in.