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These pacifists objected to their seven-year-old daughter being taught this "evil" word. The voodoo-viewpoint of these people apparently equates a word with the actuality of the thing the word represents. To these parents, "gun" is synonymous with "death." (I'm unclear how the word "death" is in-and-of-itself objectionable. Death is sometimes a good thing; depends on what or who is dying and why.) To make matters worse, their delicate flower of a child later returned home with a picture of a gun as an illustration of what the word meant. Horrors!

It's amazing that a school board in Canada would ban the word "gun" from their spelling tests. Even though they reinstated the word within a week, the school made provisions for the 7-year old girl to be exempt from any requirement to spell the world "gun." However, we are not doing much better either as this article points out:

Sadly, the nonsensical reaction of these parents is no different than the response of various U.S. school officials who expel or lock up children for pointing fingers, saying "bang," drawing pictures of guns or bombs or knives, or playing with actual, physical toy guns.

Are we going to ban the world "reality?" because, terrorism, hate, violence, murder, rape, Holocaust, incest, abortion and many other words which exist in the English language are part of our reality. Not learning how to spell "gun" doesn't protect a child from violence. Banning all the "harsh" words like hatred, terror, war, hunger, misery, will not make any difference because, those things already exist.