Doc,
Thats your opinion, and thats fine, it's perfectly valid. However, you and I both know that for a large number of people in this country, seeing a nipple consitutes porn regardless of context or artistic intent. Example? I had a letter published in the last issue of American Handgunner in response to a lady who wrote the magazine saying that a cartoon caricature of John Connors wife was essentially awful and not at all family friendly. Read my letter. My name is Tim Marquart and I am from Greeley, CO. You should be able to find it on the web if you don't happen to have the issue, and if you want to see what the lady wrote, her name is Linid Towne, you should be able to find her letter on the web too. If you do, I think you will be shocked at how prudish she is. While the bulk of America probably isn't as prudish, there are certainly a few just like her, and there are lots that feel similarly, though obviously not with the passion that she feels.
The point that I was trying to make is that it is a picture, and not the real thing, and is thus not some sort of trampling of 2A rights. Whether you judge Olegs work to be porn or simply risque, they would not under any circumstances be appropriate wallpaper on a school computer. However, that doesn't mean that the school is taking away his right to take, publish, distribute, advertise or whatever else he wants to do with his picture. I see the picture of the SKS the same way. After all, it's just a picture, and as someone else mentioned, there are companies that go so far as to not even allow their workers to change the wallpaper from factory setting.
Lest you think I am uninformed on the subject, I am a high school history teacher. I am also pro-2A. Living and working in Colorado, Columbine comes up frequently, if not with the kids, then at least institutionally. Our school has had two kids expelled in the last two years for bringing weapons to school. One had a sword, one had a craptacular little .25. I was not at the school for either event, but I know about the incidents, obviously. If you think for a second that a picture of an SKS would be allowed by our principal, our district, our school board or most of the parents, your nuts. It's not, as someone else said, "arbitrary". It's a reaction by schools to a problem that they have no idea how to handle. Frankly, its probably one of the only things that this principal can react to. I don't know how big Taos' school is, but mine has about 1200 students. We have a "large' security staff of 6. That means, that at any given time, there are 200 kids that one person has the responsiblity to monitor. That, my friend, is impossible. The security knows it, the teachers know it, the principal knows it, and the kids sure as hell know it. As gunnies, we know that fear is responsible for a lot of bad decisions, and I would go so far as to say that philosophically I think that banning this SKS picture is one of them. Realistically? Good luck trying to convince anyone in the school district that it's harmless.
