Microsoft Swaps Toy Gun Emoji For Revolver -- Days After Apple Does the Opposite (arstechnica.co.uk)

The pistol emoji has become a heated topic of debate among people. Apple's decision to replace the gun with a toy pistol is getting a mixed response. Amid all this, Microsoft has announced it is replacing the toy gun emoji with a symbol for a real revolver. ArsTechnica reports: This emoji change is part of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which is rolling out now. The move has surprised some, as Microsoft and Apple had been seen as allies in an effort to dial down violence in emoji generally. In June it emerged that the two had successfully lobbied to have a sports rifle removed from the latest collection of emoji, as it was felt that two firearm symbols would be too many.Microsoft says it is only trying "to align with the global Unicode standard." The issue is that despite Apple's thought on the matter, when an iPhone (or iPad or a Mac) user sends a water pistol emoji, people with devices running non-Apple OS are only going to see a regular pistol. The article adds: Analysts had been worried that without standardisation between platforms, intent for violent emoji could be misunderstood. For instance, if someone sent an acquaintance a message using their iPhone offering to come around with some friends and some waterguns, that acquaintance might well misunderstand the thrust of the message if they were using an Android phone and saw a series of pistols.Emojipedia, an emoji reference website has a good suggestion: Apple: Don't change the pistol emoji. At least not today. Hide it. Unicode does not depreciate emojis, but there is no requirement to show all approved emojis on the keyboard. The pistol emoji could be removed from the iOS emoji keyboard without causing any cross platform compatibility issues.

Comments

B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[Anonymous Coward]

"We must take away your rights because I don't like them!"

The cry of the SJW!

Your rights are subordinate to weakling's feelings!

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[tripleevenfall]

Come on now, everyone knows that seeing a cartoonish depiction of a gun in a text message will turn a person into a violent psycho :)

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[UnknownSoldier]

Indeed.

Stupid Justice Whiners have nothing better to do.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[fahrbot-bot]

The only thing that stops a bad guy with an emoji is a good guy with an emoji.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This has literally nothing to do with rights, or whiney SJW types. It's just two companies making decisions.

And just who the hell do you think is driving such decisions?

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[spire3661]

Its a road to doublespeak. Control the words, control the thoughts.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[swillden]

Apple's lawyers, you godamn partisan idiot.

And what is motivating Apple's lawyers to care? You can throw up any number of proximate causes, but the root cause is people freaking out about guns being scary.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[Speck'sBacon]

The 2nd Amendment is the law, and attempts to abrogate it are the opposite of the rule of law.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[jdavidb]

Whose rights are being taken away here? You can do what you want with your computer, OS makers can write the programs you want and you are free to choose, etc.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[swillden]

No, it's just liability as there is established legal precedent for damages from failing to report threats, and Apple is avoiding the backlash. Idiot.

Cite one case. Just one.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[TylerJWhit]

There needs to be more emoji control! If you possess an emoji, you better have a permit.

Re: B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Emoji inclusiveness done right.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[TylerJWhit]

A gun emoji in a is a threat that Apple has to report under law? This has to be the dumbest thing I've heard today.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[zugmeister]

And the root cause of people being scared of guns is guns killing so many people.

"So if guns kill people, pencils misspell words, cars drive drunk and spoons make people fat" - I have no idea who wrote that but I think they have a point.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[Applehu Akbar]

This has literally nothing to do with rights, or whiney SJW types. It's just two companies making decisions.

No, it's the SJW whiners within companies making decisions.

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[aevan]

Adults.

I get far more asinine emoji shit from older people than younger ones. The kids just don't care while the adults find it 'cute'.

This makes as much sense as putting in a censor to replace the WORD gun with ***. Because you know, all the major terror threats and such were emoji filled, and if we banned emoji those threats could never be made.

Parents get upset, parents sue? Simple solution: toss the case out without merit, and nail the family with costs of both sides and the court. Seriously, if you want to whine about children being granted the ability to make threats DO NOT GIVE THEM A PHONE. If you don't want to prevent them having a phone, instead don't teach them to read so they can't write threats. That still leaves them able to make calls and speak words that are scary though. Want to stop teachers calling the cops on kids pointing a french fry at another student and saying 'bang'? Fix the idiots that overreact and hide in safe spaces.

What's next, blocking the non-letter characters to prevent gun ASCII? This solves absolutely nothing but generates media about appearing to 'care' and be 'doing something'

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[aevan]

Hm... should also remove the knife. And the fist. No hammers or golf clubs or such. Lots of potential weapons to threaten with, going by FBI homicide stats.

While we're at it, remove that nuclear family one, that's harassment of split families and orphans. Might accidentally send it to a kid with two dads and it taken as homophobia. Or a mixed race kid and be racist 'purism' taunting. Remove the sun emoji too, that's a threat to torture albinos. Think the cookie emoji might contain nuts...that's a death threat and a half there to peanut allergy sufferers. Might want to remove the fruit for that citrus one some suffer. Dagnabit, we'll make sure nothing could be taken wrongly or interpreted as a threat or harassment, even if we have to remove all the emoji!

Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!!

[Dutch Gun]

Emoji guns don't kill people. Emoji bullets do.

Arrggggg Emoji politics.

[LWATCDR]

Really the fact that we have Emojis is bad enough having news stories about them is just too much to take.

Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics.

[Austerity Empowers]

Then of course we have design by committee emoji's, each trying to reflecting a political interpretation of the emoji, justified by possible idiot interpretations of a pictograph. These people must live in some pretty sheltered places, because they have apparently not yet conceived of idiots powerful enough to misinterpret just about any emoji in a fatally mistaken way. We know these idiots exist, we see them every day. Usually in traffic.

I think we should simply remove weapons and weapon words from the english language. This should surely create a safer society.

Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics.

[The-Ixian]

Do people really use emoji's instead of words and expect to be clearly understood?

I would think that the intent of emoji's (like the name sort of implies) is to convey emotional content and not literal content.

If you are typing "Come over this weekend, bring (pistol emoji) and we will have fun" then you are doing it wrong. You have left a key part of your instructions open to interpretation.

Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics.

[d34thm0nk3y]

The only thing dumber than changing a gun emoji into a water-gun emoji is getting all worked up over someone changing a gun emoji into a water-gun emoji!

Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics.

[ShanghaiBill]

Do people really use emoji's instead of words and expect to be clearly understood?

Yes, many people do that. But we still need to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. There is no need for Emoji's containing assault weapons or IEDs. Emoji's should be declared "critical infrastructure" and placed under the jurisdiction of the DHS.

Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics.

[mea2214]

First they came for the revolver emoji and I said nothing because I use the pile of poo emoji ...

Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics.

[93 Escort Wagon]

The fact that the defendant is, in fact, a pig farmer, is overlooked in the capital murder trial.

That was a really bad example. The worst serial killer in Canadian history was a pig farmer - and he was feeding the women he killed to his pigs.

Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics.

[Darinbob]

Just have blank squares and then the users can draw whatever they like in those squares. Custom pictograms instead of some so-called "standards" organization constantly trying to update to the ever changing fashions. The other benefit is that it's faster to draw a detailed picture than to find the emjoi you want while scrolling through the millions that will soon be available.

Mhy other suggestions is about sending smells over the phone, but that's a topic for another thread.

Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics.

[eth1]

I think we should simply remove weapons and weapon words from the english language. This should surely create a safer society.

That's actually a great idea. Can't ban something that you can't refer to in legislation! :D

This makes me sad

[Anonymous Coward]

My best friend was killed by a gun emoji.

slashdot massacre

[Thud457]

It's been 8 days without a mass shooting, we have to do something about that!

ðY" ðY"! ðY"ðY"ðY"!
ðY"ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY"ðY"!
ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY"ðY" ! ðY"ðY"ðY"

ðY"ðY" ðY" ðY" ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY" ðY" ðY" ðY"!
ðY"ðY"ðY"! ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"!


ðY"!

Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use windows 10 you probably want a gun close.

Emojis part of unicode to begin with

[bmxeroh]

Why are emojis part of unicode to begin with? Is it literally just because it became popular with 12 year olds and 30 year olds who still think they're 12 so they needed to do something with them? Couldn't we have just made the right choice, declare emojis absolutely stupid, and take away the phones of people that try to use them? I loathe that my phone highlights words it has an emoji for. "Hey do you want to swap out this perfectly understandable English word for a tiny little picture of the thing your talking about?". "Actually, no I don't. I don't live in a pictographic culture so the written word is just fine. Thanks." I received a text invitation from my cousin (See 30yr old bracket above) to a party and I almost couldn't figure out what it meant. There were pictures of chicken drumsticks, ballons, fried shrimp, those stupid noise makers you blow into, a strawberry, a piece of cake or pie, a hotdog, and a couple of drink looking things. There were more emojis than text, so I just couldn't bring myself to actually respond to that mess.

TL;DR I hate emojis and everyone that uses them.

Re:Emojis part of unicode to begin with

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been done to death, even on /. and even by old guys like yours truly who don't use them much themselves.
There are essentially three intertwined reasons.
1 - Unicode, seeking transcoding compatibility with dingbat fonts includes a lot of dingbats. Although there are many of these, there are somewhat standardised collections and inclusion of standard dingbats in Unicode is useful.
2 - Unicode, seeking transcoding compatibility with (mainly) Japanese mobile phone character sets, includes many of their legacy characters. This is important because Unicode must support them if it is to be adopted and achieve its goal of improving international text interoperability.
3 - Text has always missed some side channels. We ourselves of course know this, otherwise we wouldn't type :-) and suchlike. The thing is, coding them as three characters that have fuck all to do with its semantics is insane (why has also been done to death here), hence the need for emoji. They're symbolic, discrete, or at least discrete enough, meaningful, usually part of plain text, so they should be in Unicode.
That doesn't mean I necessarily agree with everything emoji-related (nor with their over-reporting on /.) but not having emoji in Unicode at all is a non-starter.

Re:Emojis part of unicode to begin with

[david_thornley]

However, I remember Unicode as saying they didn't want any jurisdiction over the actual glyphs used. I don't know what the emoji's Unicode name is, but if two entities display them differently that should be just fine.

Re:Emojis part of unicode to begin with

[AmiMoJo]

It's ironic that Unicode does so much to support Japanese emoji, but so little to support the actual written language.

Unicode has largely failed in East Asia, because it just doesn't work. A Chinese airline will never use Unicode, because it can't encode their Japanese and Korean customer's names, and even some Chinese ones.

How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence?

[speedplane]

How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence? I'm a pretty liberal guy, but this is liberalism going crazy. Removing characters from our language is not going to make the world more or less peaceful (and I'm sorry, but now emojis for better or worse, are part of our language). This is some crazy 1984 New Speak stuff.

Re:How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence?

[El Cubano]

How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence? I'm a pretty liberal guy, but this is liberalism going crazy. Removing characters from our language is not going to make the world more or less peaceful (and I'm sorry, but now emojis for better or worse, are part of our language). This is some crazy 1984 New Speak stuff.

I am seriously frustrated by this, same as you. When I read "dial down violence in emojii" I thought I was caught some sort of Kafkaesque tyranny of the perpetually offended. I mean seriously, the fact that people get worked up over this is about as laughable as people getting worked up over the old Looney Toons bits with Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote or with Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny (that one usually featured an actual firearm, <GASP>).

An emojii is literally a cartoon depiction. The world has much bigger problems. For example, real violence.

Re:How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence?

[speedplane]

Making threats easier to make increases the number of threats

Some points:
A - The purported purpose is to reduce violence, not reduce threats.
B - How does a gun emoji make it "easier" or encourage people to make threats when they can just type "gun", or "I'm gonna shoot you"?
C - Even assuming there is a link (which I don't think there is), how can that possibly be more important than censorship?

Re:How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence?

[Kohath]

Obviously gun emojis don't cause violence. But there are lots of people willing to make violent threats on the Internet. We don't need another semi-cutesy way for douchebags to say "maybe I'm threatening to kill you but I dare you to prove it".

Re:How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence?

[lgw]

No one can shoot you through the internet. Free speech, on the other hand, if a fundamental right that is quite important on the internet.

I side with Microsoft

[randomErr]

Emoji's are meant to be a quick and simple way to express what is going on in our lives. Guns are real part of our lives. They can be used for cruelty or entertainment. If we keep censoring every little thing because someone might be offended we'll devolve in and Orwellian society.

Standards and Definition

[Anonymous Coward]

Unicode defines the glyph (U+1F52B in the "Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs" block) as "pistol" with the keywords "gun, handgun, pistol, revolver, tool, weapon." This is unambiguously not a symbol for a toy. Apple is in the wrong here for not adhering to standards, but being wrong and not adhering to standards has never stopped them before, so this shouldn't really be a surprise.

It's time for the NRA to create some emojis

[DrXym]

Maybe an NRA logo, and a happy guy holding his AR-15, and a woman with her concealed carry Ruger LC-9, and a kid with a deer in his sights and a purse snatcher laying dead in a pool of blood. Let's define a shitload of gun themed emojis and submit them to Unicode. If Apple / Microsoft / Google can do it, then why not anyone else. Let's not stop at the NRA either. I'm sure Black Lives Matter, Coca Cola, the Church of Scientology, and NAMBLA all have some great ideas for emojis.

Perhaps at some point Unicode might realise the fucking lunacy allowing emojis into their system in the first place.

Re:It's time for the NRA to create some emojis

[Whorhay]

I am frankly surprised the world has gone on so long without a goat.csx emoji.

Re:Why are emojis so important?

[arth1]

I still can't figure out why they are so important. I have never used one myself. I don't see how they add any value to a conversation.

They can be useful when people who don't speak a common language too well still communicate. I had to explain aubergine to someone who knew it as eggplant, so I put the emoticon in the text. (And received "eeewwww, Barney's penis?" back, but that's beside the point)

This is what ruins emoji

[WaffleMonster]

You find a nice Emoji you want to send only to come to realize person receiving is likely to see something completely different than what you intended assuming it will even render properly on the target device at all.

They change between operating systems and even within versions of the same operating system. What looked awesome or conveyed an idea on earlier versions of Android looks like shit in later versions of Android. What looked awesome on Android looks like shit or barely even legible on iPhone or WP receiving it.

Emoji smileys all look like bloated gummy turds as is. Between PC BS and constant reskinning to go with "design language" of the day I don't see any hope or future in Emoji. Given the current trajectory there will be some embedded reference that takes over from Unicode and with it an end to death by committee.

Still no emoji/unicode on Slashdot

[jdavidb]

And yet I still can't post Emoji here because Slashdot doesn't support Unicode, even after SoylentNews led the way showing how to do so for the same software over a year ago.

If I post a pistol emoji, it looks like this: ðY"

Emoji may not be something most of us like, but they make a great test for seeing if a site supports unicode or not.

Dueling slogans

[maiden_taiwan]

Apple: Aim Different.

Microsoft: Who Do You Want to Shoot Today?