How times change.
Perhaps I am only thinking the book is anti-firearms because of my perspective on school reading books.
I remember my sixth grade (or so) reader which described in great detail the lives of the pioneers in a fictional northeast town called Hastings Mills.
The author went through great detail on how they lived, what they did. For the girls there was information on how they maintained the cooking fire, how to prepare and preserve food, what a "quilting bee" was all about, etc, etc.
For the boys, there was tons of information on hunting and fishing. The "hero" of the story was a young Tom Hastings, and at one point he was old enough to participate in the annual Turkey Shoot before the Harvest Celebration.
His dad, who had founded the town, was a miller (whence "Hastings Mills") and showed him how to load the muzzleloading rifles, how to prime the pan and shoot, etc. He even took him down to the "gunsmith" / blacksmith's shop to let him watch the smith rifle the barrel which Tom's dad was going to give him on his birthday. The single-cut rifling process was described in detail, as was so many other things --like how the grain mill worked, how powder was made, where to get the guano (local caves) for the saltpeter, how to extract it, etc.
The turkey shoot was described, with a live turkey tied down behind a log. THe skill was not only to shoot the turkey, but to "gobble him up" so he'd raise his head over the log to look around.
Gad! Can you imagine this book being used as a school reader nowadays, 60 or so years later?
How politically incorrect!
Nowadays, I suspect most people don't realize you have to kill a turkey to eat it. They probably think they're made out of soybeans or something.
So:
When I hear about a modern school reader where a gun fires through some rather contrived circumstances involving a spark from a fireplace, and through some bizarre concatenation of improbabilities, strikes someone a distance away, and where the rifle itself is deemed evil and thrown in the river by an emotionally distraught owner, hey...
...I can't help but think that the writer has capitulated to the anti-firearms attitudes of the textbook publishers.
For the sake of a buck.
230RN said that, and he ain't takin' it back.