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Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

So they're using the same character space, and just changing the graphic to a squirtgun?

That'll go over well.

"Hey, after school we should sneak up and [squirtgun] John, Mary and Pete!" sent on an iOS devices will turn into "Hey, after school we should sneak up and [handgun] John, Mary and Pete!" on other devices.

One of these statements implies a prank. The other implies murder.

Maybe Apple should work with the Unicode Consortium to declare additional emoji, such as a squirtgun, so that they can drop the handgun emoji from their keyboard and replace it with the squirtgun.

As it stands now, they're just swapping the graphic of a lethal weapon with a children's toy and crossing their fingers that no horrific misunderstandings occur...

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I agree with you, it adds ambiguity to the meaning. Can you imagine a court interpreting two completely different meanings based on sender/receiver device graphics?

The original definition is actually "PISTOL" (U+1F52B) with alternative definitions as "GUN." Apple isn't making the world a safer place by pretending guns/pistols aren't a reality.

What next, remove the word "pistol" from their spellchecker?

> What next, remove the word "pistol" from their spellchecker?

That, and any other ungood words. Helps prevent crimethink.

So, Orwell was a bit off and Newspeak is actually going to be emoji based.

Are they ACTUALLY replacing U+1F52B with this new graphic, or are they using a new codepoint? Because at least OSX 10.11 has a real gun/pistol in U+1F52B. You'll even get mixups if an iOS10/OSX10.12 user sends an emoji to an iOS9/OSX10.11 user in that case.

I just created a note containing the Pistol emoji on macOS 10.11 (old school pistol) and it shows up as a squirt gun on iOS 10 beta 4, so it seems they are reusing the same code point.

That's crazy.

I'm not sure this is that big a deal considering the default Windows representation of the pistol emoji has always been a toy gun rather than a realistic depiction of a firearm. It looks more like a ray-gun to me rather than a water pistol, so you're unlikely to say "we should [ray-gun] John after school", but there's clearly opportunity for misinterpretation if you're trying to communicate with these symbols.

But I would have thought the obvious solution was to avoid using emoji as a form of communication. They're always going to vary from one platform to the next, so you never really know exactly what the recipient is going to see.

> I'm not sure this is that big a deal considering the default Windows representation of the pistol emoji has always been a toy gun rather than a realistic depiction of a firearm.

Except that they're changing it to a handgun with the Anniversary Update: http://emojipedia.org/pistol/

That's good to know - I think that's a sensible move, and I agree with those that think Apple's change is a bit silly. However, my point still stands that emoji have always been a source of miscommunication [1] and will continue to be so, with or without this change.

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/debug/emoji-miscommunicate/

The gun is facing the opposite direction, so it would be "get shot by John, Mary and Pete".

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