Thank you for the link. I was hoping that people were imagining that getting punched in the throat wouldn't cause more than momentary discomfort, but the article leads me to believe that people do think it could be quite serious or fatal. The last comment in the comments section summed it up for me: "It's about as funny as rape to me."

If someone said "I'd like to throw him in a meat grinder", I don't think I'd have a similarly negative reaction, because, I guess, I wouldn't expect that the speaker would have access to a person-size meat grinder (unless they worked at a meat processing plant, in which case I would find it it pretty disturbing.) I wonder if part of my problem with this talk of throat punching is that anyone really could impulsively do such a thing.