Well put. While I still think virtually all "zero tolerance" policies are terrible, /u/SinfulSound's reply would be a poster child justification for one, to avoid letting any gamer's be incorrectly trained that death/rape/whatever threats are "no big deal".

So a kid starting playing CounterStrike and learns that "I'll kill you and your family" is an appropriate taunt (and, true, within that game context with a certain group of people, it's an appropriate and meaningless taunt). If that kid doesn't quickly acquire a moderate sense of social context, and some don't, that kid might actually think it's ok to email some random woman they disagree with using a similar taunt. Of course, in the general email world "I'll kill you and your family" means at best "I'm trying to criminally harass and intimidate you" and at worst "I'm literally going to try to kill you and your family". So now this kid has committed a felony and this woman is going to have PTSD, all b/c he didn't just say "I think you're dumb and should be quiet", which is what he meant in the first place and isn't really that bad.

I'm actually starting to wonder if this particular phenomena might not actually be a pretty gamer-specific problem, perhaps b/c so many people share that thinking. The only time I've ever dealt with anything like this was when a friend's younger brother, who happened to be a hardcore CS gamer, got sloppy drunk and threw up all over the place and threatened to slit all our throats (including my wife's) in our sleep. I think I quite reasonably refrained from beating him, but did declare that he was forevermore banned from my house. Weeks later when that ban actually meant he couldn't attend something, he was very upset at my "extreme" reaction and thought it was b/c of the vomit not, you know, the death threats.