It was removed in 2018 by Google. Apple took theirs away in 2016.

Market research said people think guns are scary. Companies fix it by removing scary guns.

Don't like it? Blame capitalism!

yeah, I am not even tripping about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji

Emojipedia as usual has writeups on this stuff:

https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/

https://blog.emojipedia.org/all-major-vendors-commit-to-gun-...

> I want to be like "oh btw this isn't an intervention, and you don't get a choice..."

It's people like you that make platforms want to remove such emojis.

Each service implements their own version of each emoji. Slack, Apple, Google all changed some time ago.

I just don't understand the logic to this.

So the argument is that a water pistol makes aggressive messages look less aggressive?

Isn't that dangerous for the person who receives a message they are no longer perceiving as an actual threat?

You can't just delete all the mean words out of the dictionary and stop people from finding a way to talk shit to each other. I would argue that any attempt to obfuscate the language in order to make people feel safe, in fact does the opposite.

Same could be said about banning the racists. Why ban them when it's so much more useful to be able to monitor them?