Apple is replacing its gun emoji with a water pistol, and a lot of people intent on clinging to their guns and their religion are up in arms.
Responding to a campaign to disarm the iPhone, Apple will drop the “traditional” NRA-approved gunmetal grey revolver in its next iOS update, replacing it with a colorful green squirt gun. The shooter’s even tipped with an orange muzzle, to let law enforcement know that it’s not a real gun.
Predictably, FoxNews complained,
There is nothing particularly threatening about the current handgun picture. You only see the side of the gun; it isn’t pointed at the reader or anyone else. No bullets are even being fired.
No bullets are being fired, because everybody knows pictures of guns aren’t real guns. They can’t fire bullets.
Maybe so, but like sticks and stones and words, they can inflict a lot of damage. The past few years have seen an increase in arrests for weaponized emoji. Last winter, a twelve year old Virginia girl who was apparently being bullied by other students in her class was arrested for an Instagram with the message, “meet me in the library Tuesday,” followed by emoji of a gun, knife, and bomb:
Her post was brought to the attention of school authorities, who charged her with computer harassment and threatening a school. Apparently, “But it’s not a real gun” is no excuse.
And a New York grand jury was asked to decide whether this emoji of a gun pointing at a police officer's head represented a true threat to police officers:
We have yet to see a ransom note consisting entirely of emoji, but the Supreme Court recently considered an emoji-related appeal. In 2015, Anthony Elonis, who served three years in prison for Facebook threats, asked the court to overturn his conviction. Elonis insisted that when he wrote he was going to take a gun to his ex, as well as an FBI agent, various police officers and sheriff’s deputies, and a nearby kindergarten, he added disclaimers, like the universal symbol representing a tongue sticking out -- :P -- which proved he was “just kidding” (Elonis v. United States). Elonis claimed his posts were therapy, art, and satire, types of speech protected by the First Amendment. Elonis’s lawyers explained to the court how Facebook worked and what an emoji was. But the justices aren’t that clueless. The court didn’t rule on whether emoji had First Amendment protection, but to show just how hip he is, Chief Justice Roberts signed his opinion with the universal symbol :) . Srsly, he did. O.K., no, he didn’t. I was like, 
.
Emoji have become essential for digital communications, so it’s no surprise that picture messages have suddenly become as dangerous as the words they represent. Plus, the First Amendment protects most speech—including, thanks to Citizens United, unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns, because money is speech, as we all know from the expression “money talks.” But there’s still no constitutional right to keep and bear smileys. Since Apple is a corporation, it can spend whatever it wants on the 2016 election, and it can legally ban a gun emoji if it wants to.
There are a lot of gun owners in the United States, and when they have to defend themselves, they’re not going to pick up a water gun. So it stands to reason they don’t want to text toy emoji when they have to defend themselves online. But fortunately there is a silver bullet. Anyone who is upset because Apple pried their gun emoji from their cold, dead, thumbs, can simply switch to Microsoft, because Windows 10 is replacing its cartoonish ray gun with a realistic pistol. It’s all part of a corporate effort to make Microsoft's emoji “more human, more personal, more expressive.” You know, like money?
Microsoft is right. For people too busy to use actual words, emoji should be human, personal, and expressive enough to text everything from mwahaha to classics like Pride and Prejudice and Hamlet.
And maybe you agree with the NRA that guns don’t kill people, or with FoxNews that emoji don’t kill people. But when you do need to text a threat, you don't want a water gun. For maximum impact you want that threat to be human, personal, and really, really expressive, like a .45.
Maybe you think the solution to a bad guy with emoji is a good guy with emoji. But I’m with Apple on this one. Because Eddie Izzard got it right when he said, “The NRA says ‘Guns don’t kill people, people do.’ But I think the gun helps.”
