If George Lucas had created Jar Jar Binks in 2010, would fans have done the same to him? Is this purely a gender thing?
I've received death threats just doing customer support at a previous job.
There's always going to be crazy douches out there who say crazy douche things. If we start legislating away free speech (and I realize this is a UK site where that's already happened even more than in the US) because of the 0.001% of psychotic douchebags then we're harming ourselves and not really protecting anyone.
Making death threats is already illegal, we don't need any more legislation about it.
That being said, the gaming community tends to be a fair bit more vitriolic when women are involved.
One of the reasons why even as a die-hard gamer I disassociate completely from the community that surrounds it. The only community I've found that doesn't make me red with rage is the Kerbal Space Program community.
The forum mods there tend to be utterly draconian in what they won't tolerate, and this kind of shit would get you IP-banned basically instantly. The discussion of games is generally a much higher-level thing and the community is relatively self-policed, too.