by Jason Snell
Jeremy Burge on the gun emoji
Emojipedia’s Jeremy Burge weighs in on Apple changing its gun emoji to a water pistol in the latest iOS and macOS betas:
The real issue here is that emoji is bigger than Apple. Or to put it more succinctly, this is dangerous. If Apple goes ahead with this change in the public iOS 10 release, one person could innocently tweet a toy and have that be seen by others as a weapon.
All other vendors display this emoji as a real gun. Even if they all decided to follow-suit and change to a water or toy gun(which could happen, if Apple sticks with this), the change would take a considerable amount of time.
Burge’s suggested solution: Apple could just hide the gun emoji from its keyboard, making it more difficult for people to use it, but retaining compatibility with other platforms.