When Apple users update to iOS 10, the pistol emoji will be gone, and in its place they’ll find a lime green water gun. Where there once was a deadly firearm, there's now a cartoon of one of the most popular pool toys known to mankind.
The blog post announcing iOS 10’s new cast of emoji characters, which also includes women emoji as surfers and constructions workers, doesn’t mention the pistol and focuses instead on the new gender diversity. Still, the water gun speaks loudly. “This is strange for Apple,” says Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia. “I can’t think of another example of Apple doing much more than a graphics refinement. It’s rare for them to really overhaul what an emoji means.” Which is exactly what Apple has done. They're not banning guns, just making them innocuous.
Under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple has taken a stance on issues ranging from gay marriage to climate change. Now the company is entering the conversation around gun control. This began, at least publicly, in May, when Apple joined other tech companies in opposing the Unicode Consortium’s proposal to add a rifle emoji. By throwing its weight in, Apple reportedly blocked the rifle from making it to the most recent version of Unicode. The water gun update in iOS 10 makes Apple’s position even clearer: guns---real guns---have no place in our emoji vocabulary.
What’s less clear is how this update will affect users. Clearly, emoji matter. Users everywhere celebrated when Unicode introduced its hotly-anticipated palette of skin tones---and rightly so. “The most popular emoji are the face and hand emoji,” says internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. “So why should a person of color have to embody themselves as a white person to communicate on the internet? That seems really weird. Or why should a women embody herself as a man to say she’s playing a sport? That’s weird.”
But restricting access to a gun emoji is different than improving racial and gender representation. If the point is to discourage casual conversation about guns, Emoji users will find a way around the censor. They’ll type out the word “gun,” or simply initiate the water gun into the Euphemistic Emoji Club. (The eggplant and the peach are high-ranking members.)
Plus, practically, the water gun will only be available to Apple users. Emoji look different on different platforms, and in this case Android or Microsoft users will still see a silver, metal-looking gun on their screens. (Microsoft actually introduced a water gun emoji a while back, but announced yesterday that its Windows 10 Anniversary update will use a revolver icon instead. Weird timing.) This could quickly lead to some misunderstood texts.
“If Apple changes it, and the other vendors don’t change it, there’s a real danger there, where some people send a humorous squirt gun and other people get something different,” Burge says. On top of that, the new water gun points in the opposite direction of the original pistol emoji. Consider the sarcastic juxtaposition of a gun emoji with a head emoji (translation: "shoot me"), which Burge says is by far the most popular use case for the gun emoji. If the pistol points in the opposite direction, it tampers with the meaning. "The biggest linguistic impact will be the direction it’s facing, because that could cause chaos,” McCulloch says.
So why keep a gun in the mix at all? Why not ditch weapons altogether, and throw out the knife and the bomb, too? Well, for starters, Apple can’t. Unicode decides what emoji make it to keyboards; tech companies like Apple and Android decide how to visually interpret them. Plus, axing icons would quickly cause an outcry over Apple-imposed censorship.
But there’s also something poetic about turning a pistol into a toy. “It’s a water gun---come on. We all played with them as kids,” says Leah Gunn Barrett, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, who recently wrote an open letter to Apple asking it to remove the gun emoji from its products, as a symbolic gesture. Barrett also points out that New York’s gun laws require that toy firearms be brightly colored and translucent---a policy she commends, because it’s designed to prevent kids from looking like they’re carrying a weapon. “We take that green plastic water pistol emoji as a move in the right direction,” she says. And it is just a step: no one's pretending emoji will change gun law legislation. But it can't hurt to have Apple on your side.
