Microsoft, Google & Facebook replacing gun emojis with water pistols

Microsoft, Google and Facebook have now all joined Silicon Valley’s anti-gun brigade and are replacing their gun emojis with a water pistol.

Apple was the first to rebrand the weapon in 2016 following a series of mass shootings in the US. Other major players were hesitant to join the PC brigade at first, in fact, Microsoft announced days later that they were doing the reverse by changing their space gun to look more realistic.

At the time, it was thought the update would cause more confusion by deviating from the global Unicode Standard across devices and apps. The code ensured that emojis appeared to have the same meaning irrespective of the device it was sent to or from.