this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
146 points (95.6% liked)
Political Weirdos
824 readers
171 users here now
A community dedicated to the weirdest people involved in politics.
- Focus on weird behaviors and beliefs
- Follow Iemmy.world TOS
- Don’t be a jerk
founded 6 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Rare, and I mean extremely rare musk W. Changing them to water pistols was fucking stupid and has never and will never do anything to change gun violence in America
I would argue it's two wrongs don't make a right.
An emoji is defined as "a small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion, etc."
So the message, "See you later (gun)" might be taken as a threat. Where the message, "See you later (water pistol)" might indicate a fun activity.
So an emoji on one platform should convey a similar message on another platform. We wouldn't be happy if words changed, so we shouldn't be happy when other symbols (emoji) change.
We can look at the "dancer" emoji, which historically displayed a dancing man, a dancing woman, or a gender neutral dancer. The emoji standard has since added specific rules for showing the correct gender, so there is no/less confusion.
Apple was wrong to change the emoji from a "gun" to a "water pistol". Other platforms were wrong to follow, although it did clarify and make the emoji less confusing. Twitter is now also wrong to change it back.
Arguably the best solution is to rename the current "gun" emoji to "water pistol" and to introduce a new emoji for "gun".
no, the correct solution would be to add a new emoji that is for water gun as a large reason for unicode's existence is to never change the meaning of existing symbols, 🔫 has always been the pistol emoji.
I'd be fine with that too.
I also did some digging.
Per the "Name Stability" policy you're right that 1F52B will always have the name "Pistol". That name was set in Unicode 6.0. However in Unicode 9.0 the aliases/annotations of "handgun, revolver" were added. These seem to be aliases, but not formal aliases since those have specific rules, so it's not clear to me if they can be changed. There is also an identity policy, but how it might apply in this specific case is unclear.
I bring this up since other Emoji have similar aliases that are unclear. For example the "old key" emoji mentions "encryption", the "dagger knife" emoji mentions "rated for violence" and "hate", and the "lips* emoji mentions "rated for sex".
As such it isn't clear on identity. So is "water pistol" a valid interpretation of "pistol"? I still think not, but I think it's a reasonable argument, even if that wasn't the original intention.