The Pistol emoji is an emoji defined by the Unicode Consortium as depicting a "handgun" or "revolver".[1]
Historically its rendering has been inconsistent across vendors, with some displaying it as a handgun, and others as a ray gun or water pistol. It was originally displayed as a handgun on most systems;[2] as early as 2013, Microsoft chose to replace the glyph with a ray gun, and in 2016 Apple replaced their version with a water pistol.[3] By 2018, following the Parkland high school shooting and subsequent mass demonstrations against gun violence in the United States, most major platforms were displaying the emoji as a water gun.
The pistol emoji was originally included in proprietary emoji sets from SoftBank Mobile and au by KDDI.[4] In 2007, Apple encoded them using SoftBank's Private Use Area scheme.[5] As part of a set of characters sourced from SoftBank, au by KDDI, and NTT Docomo emoji sets, the gun emoji was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name "Pistol".[6] Global popularity of emojis then surged in the early to mid-2010s.[7] The pistol emoji has been included in the Unicode Technical Standard for emoji (UTS #51) since its first edition (Emoji 1.0) in 2015.
In August 2016, Apple announced that in iOS 10, the pistol emoji would be changed from a realistic revolver to a water pistol;[8] [9] Apple had previously put pressure on the Unicode Consortium not to approve a rifle emoji,[10] with one consortium member quoted as saying "engineers that are concerned about standards and internationalization issues [...] now have to do something more in line with Apple or Google's marketing teams".[11]
One day after the glyph alteration by Apple, Microsoft pushed an update to Windows 10 that changed its longstanding depiction of the pistol emoji as a toy ray-gun to a real revolver.[12] Microsoft said to Engadget: "We will continue to work with the Unicode Consortium to refine and update glyphs that reflects customer needs, feedback and supports a consistent system that works across the digital world".
By 2018, following Parkland high school shooting and subsequent mass demonstrations against gun violence, most major platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter had transitioned their rendering of the pistol emoji to match Apple's water gun implementation.[13] Apple's change of depiction from a realistic gun to a toy gun was criticized by others, among them the editor of Emojipedia, which did not support the change because it could lead to messages appearing differently to the receiver than the sender had intended.[14]
Insider Rob Price said it created the potential for "serious miscommunication across different platforms", and asked "What if a joke sent from an Apple user to a Google user is misconstrued because of differences in rendering? Or if a genuine threat sent by a Google user to an Apple user goes unreported because it is taken as a joke?"[15] Margaret Rhodes of Wired said that "Apple's squirt gun emoji hides a big political statement."[16] The Collegiate Times claims that "the use of the firearm emoji does not always indicate gun violence."[17] Jonathan Zittrain of The New York Times claimed that Apple should be no more responsible if someone uses a gun image in the abstract than if someone happens to type the word "gun."[18]
In July 2024, the pistol emoji on X (formerly Twitter) was changed back to represent a realistic gun, with site owner Elon Musk saying that "Nerfing of the gun emoji matches rise of the woke mind virus, as a core tenet is equating fake harm with real harm."[19]
In 2015, a 12-year-old girl in Virginia faced felony charges, including "computer harassment", for threatening messages she had posted on Instagram that included the pistol emoji, alongside the knife and bomb emoji.[20] [21] [22] In Brooklyn, New York the same year, a 17-year-old boy was charged for use of the pistol emoji in part of what was construed to be a threat. According to Reason Magazine Elizabeth Nolan Brown reporting, "Cops were dispatched to Aristy's house, which they searched, finding marijuana and a firearm. In addition to charges for making "terroristic threats" and "aggravated harassment," Aristy was also charged with drug and weapon possession. He was subsequently arraigned, with bail set at $150,000."[23]
In 2016, a 22-year-old man in Drôme, France was jailed for 3 months and fined €1000 by a Valence court after sending his ex-girlfriend a gun emoji.[24] [25]