Here we go again: Matthew Murray, the gunman who killed four people in Colorado on Sunday the ninth, has now been identified as not only the product of a devoutly Christian family, but as someone who had been homeschooled all his life.

You know what this means. Once again people will be pointing to homeschooling as the source of dysfunctional teens and adults and the mainspring of Christian fanaticism. The first headline MSNBC put up--they've since changed it--was that Murray was homeschooled.

This bothers the hell out of me. I know a lot of homeschooled kids, their sibs, their parents, and their educators. Some of them are Christians. Most of them are not. All of them are devoted to getting their kids an education that responds to their needs, instead of seeing them forced into the more and more rigid mold of the modern public school system. They can see, as more and more public school parents are seeing, that teachers are being forced to teach to tests, to meet federal requirements, rather than teach kids so that they actually acquire educations.

Homeschool families choose to homeschool their kids for all kinds of reasons. Their kids are bright, or have learning or emotional or physical disabilities the school cannot accommodate, and thus the kids are being left behind, or they are acting out. The school is poor or rich and their kids cannot fit in, or the other kids and even the staff make it very hard on the kids. The family has a belief system the school cannot or will not accept, or a belief system they feel is undermined by public education. The kids have allergies to the actual materials in the school. Often the reasons people choose to homeschool are a combination of many of these things.

And there are as many kinds of homeschool as there are problems that lead families to elect to homeschool. There are programs supervised by outsiders, programs supervised online, programs in which the kids are tutored outside the home for some classes, programs in which tutors come in, and programs launched from a resource center, where families can go for books, some classes, and social interactions. And there are classes inside the home, run by family members.

No one homeschools to create nutjobs. They homeschool in the hope that their kids will grow up to be happy, well adjusted, and well educated. In the case of religious homeschoolers, they also hope to rear their children in the faith of their forebears. Once, not so long ago, all schools did that, and no one questioned it. Once, not so long ago, there were parts of America where the only schooling available was homeschooling, and no one thought the worse of it. Abraham Lincoln was homeschooled.

So when the media goes nuts and points to homeschooling as the creator of Matthew Murray, think of all the killers who have come from public schools as compared to those who have come from homeschools. And also think about how many people with an education of any kind who commit mass murder are just plain crazy.