Can our PC society sink any lower?

Stick a fork in us. We are done. Political correctness has finally corrupted rational thought and common sense to the point that garden variety sports trash talk is a firing offense.

Consider the case of Chad Shanks. He was hired to grow the Houston Rockets' social media presence. By all accounts, Shanks had done a good job, posting edgy viral content and pregame and postgame interviews with players and coaches on various social media channels. He helped grow the Rockets Twitter following to upwards of 682,500 followers.

But on Tuesday he sent out a tweet from the official account at the end of a series-clinching win against the Dallas Mavericks that the Rockets deemed "in very poor taste," and he was summarily, unceremoniously fired.

The fatal tweet was directed at the Mavericks and featured emojis, or cartoon-like characters, of a gun aimed at a horse, accompanied by this text: "Shhhh. Just close your eyes. It will all be over soon."

The metaphor here is hardly obscure: The ailing Mavs are a dying horse, better off put out of its misery.

Let's be clear: Shanks wasn't threatening anyone. There is no actual horse in a barn somewhere that should fear for its life.

It was friendly trash talk. And had Shanks not used a gun emoji, I'm certain no one would have even noticed.

But because it's 2015 and we have made finding offense a major industry — and a particularly lucrative one when guns are involved — Shanks was suddenly advocating "violence toward animals." In the days after, he found himself in the supremely preposterous position of having to tell the Houston Chronicle that he "didn't mean to advocate violence toward animals."

Lest you think that's as far as the boundaries of irrational outrage can go, some on Twitter decided Shanks was invoking sexual assault. Someone with the handle @Gtophil asked, "Did people miss the rape undertones of that phrase?" (The tweet was subsequently deleted.) Another outrage aficionado who goes by @ddoyle76 was even more condemning: "He managed to reference murder, animal cruelty, and a well-known rape joke with those two emoji, so . .. not exactly a martyr."

We are all doomed.

Our outsized determination to assure we offend exactly no one has gotten the best of us, clouding our better judgment and taking the fun out of the very spaces where fun is meant to thrive unfettered by finger-wagging etiquette arbiters and the humorless thought police.

This is what we get for submitting to the soccer-mom socialists who decided that "winning" was no longer a politically correct outcome for youth sports, where even losing teams get trophies. Big Outrage is now lobbying at the pro level, where an NBA team's social media director has to trash talk politely.

Bravado and pride are an integral part of competition. Remove that from professional sports for fear of offending someone's delicate sensibilities and all that's left is a soulless, sanitized, corporate shell. Who wants to root for that?

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, gets it. He is, if anything, a competitive guy who won't pussyfoot around political correctness when he has something on his mind. I asked him about the tweet.

"I didn't care. Losing sucks. If I cared what was tweeted about me, the Mavs or anything else I would have multiple ulcers. Twitter is place where you are allowed to say 'Your mama wears army boots.' I don't care."

As for Shanks, he loved his job and feels bad. He put it this way to me:

"I was able to walk a fine line and keep the account entertaining without upsetting anyone. But with that one tweet I seemed to undo all the goodwill that I had built, or so I thought until the outpouring of support and kindness that I've received since the news of my firing went public."

I'm sure he'll land somewhere else. But in most corners of the economy, jobs are actually pretty hard to come by. It's a shame to think that the Rockets would treat an employee's livelihood so capriciously as to toss him out for, in essence, doing his job too well.

A representative from the Rockets tells me they "are not commenting at this time," which perfectly illustrates the fatuousness of this episode. The team's communications department, whose job it is to communicate with the press, will not talk about why it fired one of its top communicators for over-communicating. Political correctness has even professional communicators scared silent.

Previously:
• 04/27/15: Should the presidency hang on a hypothetical gay wedding invitation?
• 04/13/15: Republican women and achieving the impossible
• 04/06/15: Our earnest attempts to correct the future are actually futile attempts to prevent the past
• 03/30/15: Get serious, conservatives. We're better than this

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S.E. Cupp is a Washington-based CNN contributor and author of "Losing Our Religion."