IMO, anyone that sees someone asking for help on how to deal with a difficult situation, and thinks the best response is a "joke" that involves cutting off heads, could probably use some sort of sensitivity training.

However, that "joke" is not what received the infraction points that resulted in the ban. So all of you saying "he only made a joke", if he ONLY made the joke, there would be no problem.

As has been pointed out, john/jasballs did not get banned due to that one thread. He has gotten infractions before, and it was the accumulation of those points that resulted in the ban. If you don't understand how that works, go read the post that explains the infraction system that has already been linked to in this thread.

I do think it is unfortunate that apparently the thing(s) that pushed him over the top have been deleted. This results in people who are wondering what happened, being able to find only this "joke" and the 2 pt name calling. No wonder some people think the mods are being too trigger happy.

Now, I didn't see the deleted post, I'm only going by what others have said about its existence. But I wonder (and have wondered in similar instances in the past) if it would be better to leave the post, even if the contents had to be deleted. It is not uncommon to see posts edited by the staff with a note like "part of this post has been edited to conform to the TOS". Maybe the staff could say "the entire contents of this post has been deleted due to inappropriate content". That way it makes it easier to understand that the poster brought this upon themselves, rather than the mods being trigger happy.