Should people make fun of suicide? Absolutely not. But knowing the context of that gif, it's a hilarious gif.
However, I understand the point you're making so let's discuss the generic point. Take Barney's bored gesture, which is pretty universal at this point. I agree it'd be very insensitive to do in front of someone who lost someone to gun suicide. But this gesture has become a norm. In the 90's, we had a sitcom called "Just Shoot Me" (sidenote: It's a great sitcom). We repeat this phrase all the time when frustrated. Again, given current climate of frequent mass shootings this is a highly insensitive phrase. Yet it has become normalized. Where do you draw the line?
I think this scenario can be modeled to a long tail scenario:
So let's call the horizontal axis, "Number of people offended/triggered", and let's call the vertical axis "Phrase/gesture within cultural norm causing offense/trigger". Now we can see that, no matter what, some gesture or phrase will ALWAYS cause someone offense. Correct?
So we have to draw the line at an efficient point. Minimally causing trigger. Given that, now we can do some research on the specific usage of that gif, or the phrases we have been discussing and track their search heatmap over say....the last decade.
The graphs seem to be normalized to 100 peak, and free trends do not provide additional analytics. So let's multiply the numbers by a million.
I trended "suicide gif", it was consistently below 10 (million) per month from 2004 to 2014, then trended upwards from 10m - 40m spiking to 100m on Aug 2016 (guessing due to Suicide Squad coming out), and then trended from 40m to 20m till now.
I trended "gun to head" and this is a bit more interesting, spiked in September 2005 to 100m (anyone know why?), but otherwise been pretty consistent between 30m to 90m since then.
I trended "blow my brains", very interesting, Spiked at Jan 2004 at 100m, then again at October 2005 at 100m and have been at or below 25m per month since 2005.
So looking at those figures, what can we ascertain? I am curious on your (all of you) thoughts. I wish I could share the graphs, but maybe you guys could perform the same trend searches and validate my research.
I think specifically there have been no upward trends or ticks of these phrases, so we should be ok as the number of people being interested in these phrases seem to be fairly consistent aside from the spikes at fall of 2005. And that particular spike is very curious.
