If you often find yourself longing for the halcyon days when paintball was just paintball, you’re not alone. The sport has fallen prey to an international conspiracy of jihadists. Because they used it to train for terror attacks, you can’t use it to let off a little steam on a Saturday afternoon. Unless, that is, you want your neighbors calling the Department of Homeland Security on you.

Blame it on Ali Asad Chandia, a third grade teacher in College Park, Maryland and the son of a Pakistani lawyer. The AP reported this weekend that he was sentenced to 15 years of prison by a Virginia judge for his involvement with illicit paintball games. The players, 12 Muslim-Americans known as the “Virginia jihad network,” played the game “in order to prepare for the holy war around the globe.” Chandia did not actually participate, but he was “acquainted with some of those accused of playing.”

Chadia was found guilty of helping to ship 50,000 paintball pellets from the U.S. to Pakistan. For Matthew Barakat, who wrote the AP article, these pellet boxes, allegedly destined for the militant group entitled Lashkar-e-Taiba, constitute “military support.” If balls of fuschia and cyan equal “military support” in Kashmir, then I’m pretty sure the Indian government is going to be okay. But the judge in Virginia thought otherwise: he could have just given Chadia to the requisite six years, but he supplemented the punishment with the “terrorist enhancement” law, allowing him to expand the sentence into 15 years.

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Susannah Vila is an occasional contributor to Pinko. - Visit susannah's site.