Even posting a PICTURE of a gun can lose you your job

Stick a fork in us. We are done. Political correctness has finally corrupted rational thought and common sense to the point that garden variety sports trash talk is a firing offense.

Consider the case of Chad Shanks. He was hired to grow the Houston Rockets’ social media presence. By all accounts, Shanks had done a good job, posting edgy viral content and pregame and postgame interviews with players and coaches on various social media channels. He helped grow the Rockets Twitter following to upwards of 682,500 followers.

But on Tuesday he sent out a tweet from the official account at the end of a series-clinching win against the Dallas Mavericks that the Rockets deemed “in very poor taste,” and he was summarily, unceremoniously fired.

The fatal tweet was directed at the Mavericks and featured emojis, or cartoon-like characters, of a gun aimed at a horse, accompanied by this text: “Shhhh. Just close your eyes. It will all be over soon.”  The metaphor here is hardly obscure: The ailing Mavs are a dying horse, better off put out of its misery.

Let’s be clear: Shanks wasn’t threatening anyone. There is no actual horse in a barn somewhere that should fear for its life.

It was friendly trash talk. And had Shanks not used a gun emoji, I’m certain no one would have even noticed.

But because it’s 2015 and we have made finding offense a major industry — and a particularly lucrative one when guns are involved — Shanks was suddenly advocating “violence toward animals.” In the days after, he found himself in the supremely preposterous position of having to tell the Houston Chronicle that he “didn’t mean to advocate violence toward animals.”

SOURCE