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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

Interesting and entertaining article, I enjoyed reading it. Now I want a "Which Emoji Weapons Shoot Real Bullets". I'm only half joking as many emoji sets transitioned from the depiction of real weapons to some form of toy, like a colorful water pistol. It would be interesting to find out who started it and when the others followed.

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Apple started it. For a time, a text like this:

> Let’s meet at the park [pistol emoji]

Would have have very different meanings between platforms.

Eventually, all platforms followed Apple and switched to the water pistol. (The ones that still show real pistols are obsolete fonts.)

https://emojipedia.org/pistol

At this point, Apple gets to decide what emojis look like, not the Unicode Consortium.

Apple spearheaded this but you could imagine Facebook spearheading it and everybody else following.

Honestly the original gun emoji was simply a bad idea because it makes it hard to make apps that are age-rated for small children when there's a fricking gun in the system keyboard.

I don't understand how "there's a fricking gun in the system keyboard" => "hard to make apps that are age-rated for small children". It's just a tiny picture of a gun, hidden in a pile of hundreds of emojis at that. Where's the problem?

There’s also the knife, bomb, cigarette, and middle finger emojis. And Apple decided to keep the peach emoji looking like a butt:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/apple-brings-back-the-peac...

It was quite literally leftist virtue signalling. A way for those companies to say "I support gun control".

I support gun control but do not support the censorship in emojis. So I don't know about that.

If you're making such an app, you'd be filtering the content for obscenities anyway. I mean, Unicode already includes a swastika character [1]. Wouldn't you just add the gun emoji to your list of censored words and emojis?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#Written_characters

Per your link, the swastika is a religious symbol for a large number of people for a long time. It's strange to suggest that it is an obscenity just because a small number of people used it to mean something bad.

Why?

I’m a youth firearms instructor - are you saying that any app that contains so much as an icon shaped like a gun is inappropriate for children?

Having a character in the system font does not mean having it on the system keyboard.

Unicode doesn't decide anything about character appearance. Unicode is just about giving a character a number (among other interesting things for text, like collation, bidirectional text, etc.).

If Unicode issue a standard naming U+1F49A as 'Green Heart' and all major platforms implement a green heart, I'd say unicode decided something about character appearance :)

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