What is right is the lesson taught to small children and reinforced for a lifetime - you dont threaten to hurt people. Ethics is everything, it is a part of every moment of life. Grief is not an excuse to threaten violence. Period, end of discussion. There are many other ways to handle a jerk that doesn't involve threats of physical harm.
Golden rule. How would you feel if someone in emotional duress threatened to physically harm you? How would you feel if that lack of emotional control indicated that a lack of physical control was possible? You wouldn't like it, you'd probably be somewhat scared, so you should know that it's wildly inappropriate, on top of being illegal.
Not quite the end of the discussion, I'm afraid. Let's keep bumping this and see what falls out.
The vagueness of your second paragraph makes it tricky to say one way or another. Are we talking about how I'd respond to inappropriate words spoken in an office by someone I've worked with for a year, or how I'd respond to bumping into Adam Lanza in the halls of Sandy Hook one fateful day in 2012? How I'd feel would certainly depend heavily on the specific situation at hand and the context of it. I'm going to judge these situations individually as they come. "You're lucky I
don't come across that desk at you right now" are the words of a person whose grief has overwhelmed their judgment and in the heat of the moment they said something inappropriate out of anger. In such a situation, no, I would not in fact expect a person who had to watch their own mother wasting away from cancer to have their childhood Sunday School lessons at the forefront of their thoughts. That's what my own discernment would tell me, anyway 🤷♂️
If we mean threats of violence according to that word's actual definition and not the weird self-righteous one being bandied around in here, then yes, I'd say a long stint in the big house is in order. It's true, I do have what you might call a deadly allergy to bullets, so if a pissed off person starts talking about sending me a few so I can store them in my left and right ventricles, we now have a real problem on our hands and it's time for some law. You see, there's this funny little degree of distinction (picture a yawning chasm about 100 miles across) that separates the act of threatening to smack someone from the act of threatening to put someone in ICU or a Chicago overcoat. Obviously, you can't expect to keep your job if you make either of those mistakes. No un-ringing that bell. What I don't like is when folks rigidly argue from principle without taking a pragmatic look at the facts as they are. "bUt ThAtS nOt ThE wAy I tHiNk tHiNgS
ShOuLd bE" isn't useful.
The tl;dr version of all that is that at the end of the day, OP didn't inflict serious harm on anyone. She didn't show HR a gun or a nail-studded baseball bat, or imply that she planned on doing so in the immediate future or at all. HR guy is
not currently in the ER having high-caliber words surgically removed from his abdomen and is probably at home going over his investment portfolio while sipping Johnnie Walker. Doesn't seem to be anything worth moralizing about.
