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Thanks To Apple's Influence, You're Not Getting A Rifle Emoji (buzzfeed.com)
Charlie Warzel, reporting for BuzzFeed News: Unicode, the technical organization in charge of selecting and overseeing emojis, debated and ultimately decided to remove a rifle from its list of new emoji candidates in 2016, according to multiple persons who attended its quarterly meeting last May. The decision was led and championed by one of tech's biggest companies: Apple. Apple is one of Unicode's largest member companies and not only has voting rights, but also holds considerable influence. Millions of people use emojis on Apple's software platforms. According to sources in the room, Apple started the discussion to remove the rifle emoji, which had already passed into the encoding process for the Unicode 9.0 release this June. Apple told the consortium it would not support a rifle on its platforms and asked for it not to be made into an emoji. "I heard Apple speak up about it and also Microsoft," one member present at the discussions told BuzzFeed News.
Yes, I can definitely see how a rifle emoji would be threatening, but a dagger, crossed swords, skull and crossbones, a bomb , or even a pistol clearly aren't.
There's already a pistol emoji. There's no reason not to add a rifle emoji for completeness sake.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
this is the US, where guns are easy and cheap to get, and people get routinely shot over the dumbest shit
Your argument is invalid. There is no linkage between email and guns in the US. And while it may be true that people get "routinely shot" (I don't know what you mean by that), this is not because guns are "cheap and easy to get". The US has more guns now than ever before, yet violent crime has been decreasing over the past decades. Look, here's some graphs.
If the simple availability of legal guns really caused violence, then now that we have more guns than ever before, we ought to have more violence than ever before. Yet we don't.
In fact, one could make an argument that the increase in the number of guns reduced the violence in the US. I don't make that argument because correlation does not prove causation. However, you are making a causation claim and there isn't even a correlation to back you up.
I invite you to read the book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy which explores why different countries have different amounts of violence. Spoiler: it's more cultural factors than anything else.
In most countries, you'd be right to heap scorn on anyone feeling threatened by an emoji or an email.
But this is the US, where guns are easy and cheap to get, and people get routinely shot over the dumbest shit. Dude might be a bit of scaredy cat, but he's certainly not insane.
Gun violence is at an all time low
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
http://www.cnsnews.com/comment...
I know, pesky facts. Who cares about'em