JH queries my dismissal of the homeschool killer as an aberration:
Considering there are at least 45 million students attending your “evil school system”, as opposed to one million home-skoolers, your claim of 40 murders every day [committed by the public schooled] – if correct – is moot.
There’s nothing weird being “taught” in any of those one million households, is there? Of course not, just the facts: homosexuals deserve death, Earth is only six thousand years old, and Adam and Eve rode to Church every Sunday on dinosaurs.
What I find amusing (and it is certainly not the pre-meditated murder of two humans): Where is the usual crowd that complains loudly about public schools, the parents who send them there, and our secular society in general, after a shooting such as this? They are strangely silent when the offender is a Bible-toting, scripture-spouting gun-lover.
The reason the crowd is not spouting loudly about it is twofold. 1) The media is doing as much anti-homeschool spouting as it dares, 2) which isn’t much because even the most devoted advocates of the public schools don’t believe that the murders had anything to do with the kid’s education, which was by all accounts directly contrary to his actions.
More importantly, the point is by no means rendered moot by the recent murders. Let’s run through the numbers, using 2003 since those are the most recent and complete. There were 50 million school-age children, 1.1 million, or 2.2 percent, were homeschooled. There were also 16,503 criminal homicides, or 45 per day. Therefore, since most individuals are public schooled, at least 40 and probably all 45 of those murderers attended public schools. Since the increase in the number of homeschooled children is on the rise, however, it would not be accurate to point out that there should be at least one homeschooled killer every day of the year.
But the Uniform Crime Report for 2003 also shows that 3,445 murders were committed by individuals under the age of 22. Here we can point out that homeschoolers should account for 2.2 percent of those murders, or 76 of them per year. Since, to our knowledge, homeschoolers have actually only managed to commit two murders in the last three years out of the 228 that are statistically expected of them, homeschoolers appear to be 1/114th as likely to commit murder as their public school counterparts.
This alone should suffice to indicate that the public school advocates are indeed correct as their socialization is clearly lacking.