When some started referring to the day after Thanksgiving as “Black Friday,” it struck me as off the mark. It was asking for utter confusion to add the “black” modifier, usually an indicator of gloom or dread (as in “Black Sunday”), as a clumsy reference to a shopping day so profitable that retailers can move from red ink to black, signaling profitability.But now that Thanksgiving Friday is starting to yield actual casualties, maybe we can settle on the more disturbing of the connotations in the future.

Profitability aside, Black Friday has now become an occasion for fear from shoppers and retailers alike. Big savings and pre-dawn store openings are nothing new. But the death toll is.

A Wal-Mart worker in Nassau County, N.Y., was trampled to death Friday as a crazed mob of shoppers burst through a door he was opening for them at 5 a.m.

Some 2,000 people were waiting for the opportunity to reap substantial savings from special prices unique to this grisly wee-hours exercise that now plays out across cities and towns across America. Not to be outdone, more and more retailers are pushing opening times earlier and earlier, knowing that hordes of shoppers will respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the metaphoric bell of low prices.

Hardscrabble New Yorkers are not the only ones, of course. A woman working when her Dallas Wal-Mart clocks struck 5 a.m. told me she was literally frightened by the spectacle that followed. A Burleson man told me he saw people prodded to behavior he never thought he’d see in a public place.

Let’s pause to catch our breath, perhaps literally.

None of this is Wal-Mart’s fault. Its stores tend to be the datelines for such stories because they are the most noteworthy purveyor of enormous inventories of goods at affordable prices. If they choose to participate in the Thanksgiving Friday retail boom by lowering prices even more for early birds, all I can say is thanks.

But I have something else entirely to say to some of the elbowing, basket-bumping masses who choose to darken this holiday burst of commerce with their wanton disregard for their fellow human beings: If you can’t handle the adrenaline of Black Friday, stay in bed.

I don’t know what the solution is. Armed security at larger stores? Letting shoppers trickle in maybe 50 at a time? Tranquilizer darts? Whatever it takes, sanity must be restored to what was once a charming, quirky custom of retail America.

Theories abound as to why injuries may rise in inverse proportion to falling prices. The economy, say some, is driving people to desperation.

Nice try, but this is a close cousin to the failed excuse-making that tried to sugar-coat post-Rodney King-verdict rioting in Los Angeles.

Anger doesn’t make good people riot; low prices don’t make sane people go berserk in a store. Bad behavior is bad behavior, practiced by people who make the conscious choice to engage in it.

We have a year to figure out what to do by Black Friday, Nov. 27, 2009. I will do my part by refusing to take part in this lunacy and advising my family to do the same until we seem to get a grip on it.

Among those injured in the fatal New York store stampede was a woman eight months pregnant. A hundred bucks off a computer monitor is not worth a miscarriage.

She may not have known what she was getting herself into. But we all know now. Maybe the stores that opened at midnight have it right, spreading the shopping zeal across a calendar day.

Whatever retailers, shoppers, law enforcement and security personnel decide, they’d better find a way to remove the prospect of bodily injury from the first traditional wave of Christmas shopping.

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