Yesterday Apple announced it will replace the black pistol emoji with a green friendly water gun.
The announcement comes one year after New Yorkers Against Gun Violence launched the #DisarmTheiPhone campaign. The campaign’s goal was to remove the gun emoji in order to show that America wants stricter access to real guns.
The pistol emoji has caused trouble in recent years. Last year, a 12-year-old child in Virginia was charged with a felony and fined for using the pistol emoji in an Instagram post that police said amounted to a death threat. In 2015 a Texas teenager was arrested over what police believed was a tweet that allegedly threatened officers with a gun emoji.
Decisions about which emojis live and which don’t are made by an organization called the Unicode Consortium, which oversees new emojis and manages the library of existing icons. Apple, Google and Microsoft are all members of the consortium, and together they consider petitions to create new emojis that will then be available for the member organizations to include on their operating systems.
Apple recently spoke out against a petition that would create a series of rifle emojis.
Apple is also set to release new diverse emojis including female worker and athletes as well as a rainbow flag. The new emjoi will launch with the new iPhone system upgrade in September.
