Pistol emoji (courtesy telegraph.co.uk)

“Dozens of new emoji are scheduled to become available Tuesday, including smartphone-friendly designs depicting salad bowls, scooters and six different jugglers with varying skin tones,” washingtontimes.com reports. “Despite being initially approved for release, a rifle emoji and another involving a pistol will no longer be included in next week’s update. The decision to ditch the ‘rifle’ and ‘modern pentathlon’ designs from the next set of emojis was the result of an effort spearheaded by Apple and backed by Microsoft.”

Unicode is the organization in charge of emojis. The consortium’s full members are Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Oman’s Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs (I kid you not), Oracle, SAP, Symantec and Yahoo. buzzfeed.com reports that the death of the handgun emoji was a given. As for the planned long gun . . .

Though it was a unanimous decision, Unicode members are reluctant to talk about the rifle. Apple declined to comment on the company’s involvement in the decision, and a dozen Unicode members declined to speak about the discussions. When reached for comment, Unicode President Mark Davis confirmed the move but, in keeping with the cryptic organization, refused to elaborate on the reasons why. “The committee decided not to mark them as Emoji, but to add them as characters (that is, normal black & white symbols),” he wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News. Like nearly everything Unicode does, the decision is technical and complicated, but essentially, this just means that a rifle will show up in the official Unicode Character Database but will not appear on any standard emoji keyboard.”

In other words, no gun emojis because guns. More specifically, because high tech companies — with their PC billionaires at the helm —  are rabidly anti-gun. And just in case you thought this anti-gun emoji business is just a bit of silliness, Sherman set the way back machine for March 31, 2016 via telegraph.co.uk:

A 22-year old Frenchman has been sentenced to three months in prison for texting his ex-girlfriend an emoji in the form of a pistol, in the first such ruling of its kind in France.

The court in Valence in the southern Drôme département ruled that the gun-shaped character at the end of a mobile phone text message constituted a “death threat in the form of an image”, and handed the accused a six-month sentence, with three suspended.

It’s a culture war people. Let’s win it for the Gipper! Wait. Didn’t he outlaw Constitutional Carry in California? OK, do it for the children™!

 

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67 COMMENTS

  1. Wait, now they’re taking our pistol emoji?! From my cold, dead iPhone!

    Strange, no news on the Mecca emoji…

    • I deactivated my Facebook account yesterday in protest of their left-wing censorship after the Orlando terrorist attack.. I’g never own an Apple product. We’re seeing the dawn of the government/technology complex that conspires together to control the people to their detriment.

      • Eric Holder said the goal is to make guns as socially frowned upon as smoking. This censorship fits the goal.

        • Here’s a novel idea:

          Start a Hoplophobe Watch List. Anyone on this list will receive zero assistance from anyone that owns firearms, supports the 2A, upholds the Constitution or whose job employs them with a firearm.

          No more civilian, good Samaritan, police, or military protection for you.

          You are also banned from purchasing or owning a firearm or using services where firearms are integrated.

          Put your money where your mouth is and embrace your choice to be disarmed.

          And when you become a statistic or victim of a crime, I don’t want to hear a peep.

  3. So much for the first amendment. I bet the terrorists are laughing their butts off.

    Symbolic disarmament.

    While corporations and elected dunderheads waste time doing feel good actions, what time is being spent actually doing anything to address the real problem?

    • I don’t think the 1st Amendment protects you from organizations deciding to not release an emoji.

    • “Despite being initially approved for release, a rifle emoji and another involving a pistol will no longer be included in NEXT WEEK’S UPDATE. The decision to ditch the ‘rifle’ and ‘modern pentathlon’ designs from the next set of emojis was the result of an effort spearheaded by Apple and backed by Microsoft.”

      Please read the story NOT just the headline before responding. The change occurs this coming TUESDAY.

  11. Well, that’s the “gun violence” problem solved, then. Good job, everybody! Why didn’t we think of this before?

    • No need for that “no fly, no buy” legislation now, it would seem.

      On the other hand, there are still knives, swords, and BOMBS in the Apple emoji lineup. But they’re not guns, so it’s probably okay. I want to know when they’re going to remove the middle-finger emoji. That thing could be really dangerous.

      • You’re an *adult*, uncommon.

        Not a 13 year-old girl…

        (If you consider yourself a 13 year-old girl trapped in an adult male body, kindly disregard that comment. *cough*) 🙂

      • It’s easy. You click then tappy tappy tap tap….slide….and more tappy tap tap.

        ??????????????????????????????????✍?????????‍❤️‍?????????????????????????

      • Please don’t insult fertilizer like that.

        I’ve spread horse poop that I have more respect for than I do for most politicians…at least horse poop is useful for something.

  17. I wonder if a class action lawsuit would be applicable on the grounds of censorship?

    I suppose there is an opportunity now for a company to create firearms emojis as well. There is a guaranteed market of several million gun owners.

    Would be interested in how this imagery ban will play out in the courts.

  21. [““““““““““““““] — — — — — — — — —
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  25. No boundries to stupid.

    Bad guys train every day to be the worst they can be and these folks make t shirts and light candles.
    And now erase cartoons thinking that somehow if we just think nice feels….the bad will just go away.

    Is this what we’ve become?
    My ancestors must be shaking their heads?

  26. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Friends Delete Rifle, Handgun Emojis!!!!! Holy crap. We can’t let those bastards get away with this!!!!!

    Uh, what’s an emoji?

    Do normal people use them or are they only for the dead of brain and the infantile of thought?

  28. It sounds like they’re not adding NEW guns but it didn’t say they’re deleting the old one. I can hope, right?

  29. Great. Who cares. CYA. No, not cover your ass. Can You Articulate. Can your articulate your position that your inalienable right to arms and self defense cannot be reduced to an emoji. MSM and the unwashed imbeciles surrounding you reduce all of their hopes, dreams and human conditions to and emoji.

    Their ain’t no hope for MSM as they are an *industry*. But you can sure as hell CYA your position to the imbeciles sans emoji and slowly convert them. The same 12 hillbillies playing banjo are not the one’s responsible for buying every AR variant on the shelf just shy of both US coasts, as the MSM would have you believe.

    CYA. And get them to think.

  30. YEESSS! The companies who most decry censorship against their products/platforms are more then willing to use censorship to take out anything they do not like. With a few strokes of a keyboard, by wiping out a cartoon gun, they have saved the world and single handedly saved millions of lives because of a picture — WOW! Technology is powerful. Obama is wondering why he did not think of that. It would stopped the Orlando shooter from being able to communicate.

    It makes sense, remove emoji to suppress all those bad feelings that may make you use a gun cartoon to express your feelings. Instead, feel free to us one of the 73 new gender emoji to confuse your friends.

    It scores points with emotionally overwhelmed Millennium generation who only speak in text msgs and emoji who at the site of a gun emoji might pee in their pants or be so terror stricken they might miss a Facebook post from Sally that would truly ruin their day.

    Oh the horror! Thank goodness, now all the precious snowflakes will be saved one emoji at a time.

    /sarc

    Someone on the pro-gun technical side should make a “black gun” emoji and the gun community should post something with a gun emoji on Tuesday as a protest. All the platforms allow you to make a pseudo emoji and the Apple store has an Emoji maker app.

    • “The companies who most decry censorship against their products/platforms are more then willing to use censorship to take out anything they do not like.”

      Ironic, ain’t it? It’d be almost funny if they weren’t so pathetic.

      • This emoji thing merits a few laughs, but the censorship going on at FB and Twitter the past few weeks is astounding and quite reasonably should be considered alarming.

        They really do seek to control the narrative. Maybe this emoji thing is just a deflection so they can make a joke out of accusations of real censorship.

        • Well said, at the same time real censorship has existed in the schools with the zero tolerance policy for some time. They aim to disarm future generations.

  32. I don’t know, the handgun ones still show up on my wife’s ipod.

    Neither of us do Facebook because it’s such a waste of time and only empowers stalkers, so who cares if they did?

  33. Thank God Above for the Great Americans (like us here at TTAG I am proud to say) that, as did our ingenious Founding Fathers over two Centuries ago, Patriotically defend this blessed Land to this very day–if we are to rely on the rapidly, seemingly at the speed of sound, SOFTENING of the American populace to defend us, we would most assuredly be screwed overnight absent the Left extending the mere common courtesy of first buying us a drink…U.S. is changing as we speak to such a degree I do not know if we can avoid history repeating itself (I will intentionally leave this ‘perhaps’ ambiguous for now so as not to become voluminous in nature via this thread but I am confident one can read the between the lines so to speak to be sure). God Bless us and God Bless The United States of America.

  34. Id ditch them all if I could. But Ive forgotten too much about using Linux to go back.
    I don’t own my phone. Its a freebe so I gets what Im given.
    The rst long gone.

  37. Spiders and Snakes scare me more than guns.
    Are they getting of spider and snake emojis?

  38. This just in! Apple pulls funding for RNC but still funds DNC. Political? You bet! Apple just announced its bias and has thrown in it’s lot behind Hillary.
    #BoycottApple

  39. Can we at least have shotgun emojis? To defend our home screens with? Shotgun Joe Biden suggests them for our homes.

  43. Well, that might make it harder for them to tweet about … what are those things, again? That’s O K. If you can’t emoji it, it doesn’t exist, so this language purge will be just as effective at eliminating murder by shooting as gun-free zones in Orlando, or all of France.

    “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” – various attributions.

    I’m pretty sure the Jihadi folks will find some way to symbolize “shoot up the infidels” anyway. Really, they’re kinda like the French … they have a different emoji for everything.

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