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Make splash, not war: Apple removes gun emoji, replaces with water pistol

Anna Rahmanan
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Anna Rahmanan
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You'll now be able to tell your friends that you're spending the night watching American female Olympians crushing it at the track and field games in Rio by using only emojis.

Apple announced the release of over a hundred new and reimagined emojis as part of their latest operating system, iOS 10 (now in beta version, out this fall).

In addition to optimizing their roster of images by including emojis representing women and single parents (expect female detectives, construction workers and police officers to inundate your texts), the company opted to swap the existing gun emoji with a water guna seemingly unpolitical action if it weren't for Apple's earlier ventures into NRA territory. According to Buzzfeed, an Olympics-inspired rifle was proposed as a possible addition but Unicode Consortium members Apple and Microsoft argued against it. 

To many, the replacement of the pistol with a water gun seems to be a long time coming. In 2015, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence kicked off a campaign to get rid of the pistol on grounds of it being "a symbolic gesture to limit gun accessibility." Clearly, Apple agrees.

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