Wikipedia

Pistol emoji

(Redirected from 🔫)

The Pistol emoji (🔫) is an emoji usually displayed as a green or orange toy gun or water gun, but historically was displayed as an actual handgun on most older systems. In 2016, Apple replaced its realistic revolver design with a water gun emoji, resulting in other companies similarly changing their renditions over the following years.

Evolution of the pistol emoji as rendered by stock Android systems. From left to right: Jelly Bean (pistol), KitKat (blunderbuss), Lollipop (revolver), Oreo (revolver) and Pie (water gun).

Development and usage history edit

The pistol emoji was originally included in proprietary emoji sets from SoftBank Mobile and au by KDDI.[1] In 2007, Apple encoded them using SoftBank's Private Use Area scheme.[2] As part of a set of characters sourced from SoftBank, au by KDDI, and NTT Docomo emoji sets, the gun emoji was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name "Pistol".[3] Global popularity of emojis then surged in the early to mid-2010s.[4] The pistol emoji has been included in the Unicode Technical Standard for emoji (UTS #51) since its first edition (Emoji 1.0) in 2015.[3]

Character information
Preview 🔫
Unicode name PISTOL
Encodings decimal hex
Unicode 128299 U+1F52B
UTF-8 240 159 148 171 F0 9F 94 AB
UTF-16 55357 56619 D83D DD2B
GB 18030 148 57 231 51 94 39 E7 33
Numeric character reference 🔫 🔫
Shift JIS (au by KDDI)[5] 246 227 F6 E3
Shift JIS (SoftBank 3G)[5] 247 83 F7 53
7-bit JIS (au by KDDI)[1] 118 101 76 65
Emoji shortcode[6] :gun:
Google name (pre-Unicode)[7] PISTOL
CLDR text-to-speech name[8] water pistol
Google substitute string[7] [ピストル]

Controversy and popularity in social media edit

 
 
Original (left) and revised (right) Twitter designs, showing the transition from a revolver to a water pistol

The "pistol" emoji was commonly used for serious intent or threats until 2018, when it is now used for playful purposes, in most cases.[9] On August 1, 2016, Apple announced that in iOS 10, the pistol emoji would be changed from a realistic revolver to a water pistol[10] after the continuing gun violence in the U.S.[11] Conversely, the following day, Microsoft pushed out an update to Windows 10 that changed its longstanding depiction of the pistol emoji as a toy ray-gun to a real revolver.[12] Microsoft stated that the change was made to bring the glyph more in line with industry-standard designs and customer expectations.[12] By 2018, most major platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter had transitioned their rendering of the pistol emoji to match Apple's water gun implementation.[13] Apple's change of depiction from a realistic gun to a toy gun was criticized by others, among them was the editor of Emojipedia, which did not support the change because it could lead to messages appearing differently to the receiver than the sender had intended.[14] There are a few platforms that resisted the change, such as Mozilla and Docomo, but these were forced to drop out,[9] with the sole holdout of LG which dropped out but reentered and added pistol emoji for Velvet devices in 2021.[15]

Insider's Rob Price said it created the potential for "serious miscommunication across different platforms", and asked "What if a joke sent from an Apple user to a Google user is misconstrued because of differences in rendering? Or if a genuine threat sent by a Google user to an Apple user goes unreported because it is taken as a joke?"[16] Margaret Rhodes of Wired said that "Apple's squirt gun emoji hides a big political statement."[17] The Collegiate Times claims that "the use of the firearm emoji does not always indicate gun violence."[18] Jonathan Zittrain of The New York Times claimed that Apple should be no more responsible if someone uses a gun image in the abstract than if someone happens to type the word "gun."[19]

Criminal charges for use of Pistol emoji edit

In 2015, a 12-year-old girl in Virginia faced felony charges, including "computer harassment", for threatening messages she had posted on Instagram that included the pistol emoji, among others.[20][21][22] In Brooklyn, New York the same year, a 17-year-old boy was charged for use of the pistol emoji in part of what was construed to be a threat. According to Reason Magazine's Elizabeth Nolan Brown reporting, "Cops were dispatched to Aristy's house, which they searched, finding marijuana and a firearm. In addition to charges for making "terroristic threats" and "aggravated harassment," Aristy was also charged with drug and weapon possession. He was subsequently arraigned, with bail set at $150,000."[23]

In 2016, a man from France was jailed for 3 months after sending his ex-girlfriend a gun emoji.[24]

References edit

  1. ^ a b Scherer, Markus; Davis, Mark; Momoi, Kat; Tong, Darick; Kida, Yasuo; Edberg, Peter. "Emoji Symbols: Background Data—Background data for Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols" (PDF). UTC L2/10-132.
  2. ^ "Apple iPhone OS 2.2". Emojipedia.
  3. ^ a b "🔫 Pistol". Emojipedia. Retrieved December 27, 2021.
  4. ^ "Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is…". Oxford Dictionaries Blog. November 16, 2015. Archived from the original on July 10, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
  5. ^ a b Unicode Consortium. "Emoji Sources". Unicode Character Database.
  6. ^ JoyPixels. "Emoji Alpha Codes". Emoji Toolkit.
  7. ^ a b Android Open Source Project (2009). "GMoji Raw". Skia Emoji.
  8. ^ Unicode, Inc (3 June 2022). "Annotations". Common Locale Data Repository.
  9. ^ a b "What Does 🔫 Pistol Emoji Mean?".
  10. ^ Kelly, Heather (August 1, 2016). "Apple replaces the pistol emoji with a water gun". CNNMoney.
  11. ^ "Water pistol emoji replaces revolver as Apple enters gun violence debate". the Guardian. August 2, 2016.
  12. ^ a b Low, Cherlynn (August 4, 2016). "Microsoft just changed its toy gun emoji to a real pistol". Engadget. Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  13. ^ "Gun emoji replaced with toy water pistol across platforms". ABC News. April 29, 2018 – via www.abc.net.au.
  14. ^ Baraniuk, Chris (2016-08-05). "Apple urged to rethink gun emoji change". BBC News Online. Retrieved 2020-07-22.
  15. ^ "LG Emoji List [Updated September 2021]". Emojipedia.
  16. ^ Price, Rob (2016-08-02). "There's a huge problem with Apple's plan to combat gun violence by changing an emoji". Insider. Retrieved 2020-07-22.
  17. ^ Rhodes, Margaret. "Apple's New Squirt Gun Emoji Hides a Big Political Statement". Wired – via www.wired.com.
  18. ^ George, Emily. "Removing pistol emoji an empty shot at free expression". Collegiate Times.
  19. ^ Zittrain, Jonathan (August 16, 2016). "Opinion | Apple's Emoji Gun Control". The New York Times.
  20. ^ Nolan Brown, Elizabeth (29 February 2016). "Child Faces Criminal Charges After Using Weapon Emojis on Instagram". reason.com. Reason. Retrieved 30 March 2022.
  21. ^ Culver, David. "Middle-Schooler Facing Felony Charge After Allegedly Sending Threats With Emojis on Instagram".
  22. ^ Justin Jouvenal (2021-10-23) [2016-02-27]. "A 12-year-old girl is facing criminal charges for using certain emoji. She's not alone". The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. ISSN 0190-8286. OCLC 1330888409.[please check these dates]
  23. ^ Nolan Brown, Elizabeth (27 January 2015). "Brooklyn Teen Arrested for Threatening Use of Emoji". Reason Magazine. Reason. Retrieved 30 March 2022.
  24. ^ "A Guy in France Got Three Months in Prison for Texting His Ex the Gun Emoji". www.vice.com.
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