> Edit: To clarify why I find it is distasteful — In context of recent events this is just a poorly and honestly unfunny joke. But out of context, in the way in

> Edit: To clarify why I find it is distasteful — In context of recent events this is just a poorly and honestly unfunny joke. But out of context, in the way in which many may read it, it is strikingly more concerning. The point isn't whether it was a joke though, the point is that universities have a long history in the US of being the centre of vicious and deplorable acts of violence, mass violence. In the context of the university environment, I can see how jokes like this are unsettling and reminiscent of real social media posts that often proceed real attacks that maim or kill real people. The authors insensitivity to is shortsighted. This is ... peculiar. Of the total number of off-colour jokes told by people at college campuses, what percentage are followed immediately by shooting sprees? How many decimal points do you need? This is not a usable or workable early warning system. If you genuinely think your hackathon is at risk of a Virginia Tech situation, get a metal detector. Mass murderers are unlikely to check the code of conduct before opening fire. But then your concern doesn't seem to be that people could actually get shot to pieces, simply that somebody could have been unsettled by a pun. This is a level of inconvenience that nobody has any right to be protected from. It is utterly unreasonable to expect people to avoid in advance every possible 'trauma trigger', since by definition that's (for practical purposes) an infinite quantity. In reality, the only code of conduct that can reliably avoid all such awkward social situations is the Trappist code of silence. So it would be better all round if people were expected to deal with these things like adults, and instead of looking over Facebook comments with the intention of linking them to terrorist atrocities, campus shooting, or any other terrible thing that it could mean to somebody somewhere, read them as charitably as possible. If you're reading something out of context, find out the context before declaring it 'distasteful', since taste is 100% context. The take away here should be: codes of conduct of the nature that caught out the OP are necessarily non-transparent (who accused him?), and thus necessarily arbitrarily enforced, and thus necessarily unjust (since justice must be seen to be done).