Unicode Consortium, the company that approves and codes new emojis, said in June that a depiction of a scoped shooting rifle was pulled from their release on June 21, according to CNN.
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Apple is in the process of redesigning some of its traditional emoji so that users have more gender options.
“[These include] new female athletes and professionals, handsome redesigns of popular emoji, a new rainbow flag and more family options”, it said. Among the other new emojis are things like women doing stereotypical male jobs like detective and construction worker.
Apple is diversifying its emoji. All of the new emoji are also available in a range of different skin tones. Apple has replaced the handgun emoji with a bright green icon that looks like a classic Super Soaker water pistol.
Prior to the iOS 10 emoji update, Apple’s sports related emoji and a majority of its occupational emoji show only men performing such activities, which does not jibe at all with reality.
Tech giant Apple has announced on Monday that it will revolutionize its vast “encyclopedia” of emojis with its gender diverse emojis, which will be available to iPad and iPhone iOS 10 users. There are new female athletes, a pride flag, and family options for single parents. Microsoft’s emoji font already interprets the gun emoji as a toy gun. Then there was that time when cops arrested a Brooklyn teenager for posting gun emoji towards a police emoji’s head.
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Unicode recently rolled out a set of 72 new emojis and Twitter was the first to launch the same on its platform.
