Ho ho ho! Nothing says Christmas like a water pistol, am I right? I will admit that as I sat down to write this post a good eight to ten months after first planning it out, it had not occurred to me at the time just how jarring the juxtaposition would be. The ironic thing, however, is that however bouba and kiki water pistols and Christmases may be, they are nowhere near as opposed as they would be if we were talking about the water pistol’s alter ego. Because this (🔫) is not how PISTOL was supposed to look. Once upon a time, emoji guns looked a lot more like real guns.
Many previous entries in this series have noted that emoji emerged from Japan in the late 2000s. The PISTOLs that entered common usage at that time, as drawn by Google, Facebook, Apple et al, were mostly modelled on real firearms: revolvers, automatics and even antique flintlocks. Microsoft was one of the few outliers, presenting its users with a PISTOL that resembled a science-fiction raygun. (You can view all these designs, historical and current, at Emojipedia’s 🔫 page.)
With this in mind, consider a pair of news stories that appeared in 2014 and 2015 respectively. First, in April 2014, a Baton Rouge murder suspect named Christopher Jackson sent a text message laced with PISTOL emoji which was later cited in a case against him.1 Then, in January 2015, NYC police picked up 17-year-old Osiris Aristy for a Facebook post that contained yet more ‘🔫’ emoji.2 We might laugh now, when PISTOL looks like a plastic toy, but the pixelated revolvers of the time had a rather more menacing aspect.*
The year after Aristy’s arrest, and under pressure from gun control advocates,5 Apple modified its PISTOL emoji to become the now-familiar green water gun. The other big emoji vendors followed in 2018,6 so that just two years after it had played a part in the arrest of two separate people, ‘🔫’ was now a quite different symbol.
How could this this shape-shifting come to pass? Well, the thing about characters on computer screens is that, at bottom, they aren’t visual symbols at all. Instead, they’re “code points”, or numbers, each of which identifies what the Unicode standard calls an “abstract entity”.7 PISTOL, in other words, isn’t a picture of a pistol; it’s a number which represents the concept of a pistol, and what that pistol looks like is up to whoever happens to want to draw it on screen. Thus it is that Google’s PISTOL can be different to Apple’s, Apple’s different to Facebook’s, and so on. It’s even possible for different versions of the same application to have different PISTOL emoji. It’s burgergate all over again.
As if to underline the matter, in 2024 a post-acquisition X changed its friendly green water pistol back into the form of a leaden grey handgun. Hardly the most offensive or belligerent act to be laid at the feet of X’s new owner, Elon Musk, but one which is, nevertheless, depressingly on-brand.8 Merry Christmas!
- 1.
-
Broussard, Ryan. “Text Message Helps Detectives Find Suspect in Shooting”. The Advocate.
- 2.
-
Zavadski, Katie. “Brooklyn Teen Arrested for Emoji-Laden Threats Against NYPD”. New York.
- 3.
-
Gyan, Joe. “Grand Jury Takes No Action in Baton Rouge Murder Case, Suspect to Be Set Free”. The Advocate.
- 4.
-
Jouvenal, Justin. “A 12-year-old girl is facing criminal charges for using certain emoji. She’s not alone”. The Washington Post.
- 5.
-
Dunne, Carey. “NRA Loses One As Apple Replaces Revolver Emoji With Squirt Gun”. Hyperallergic.
- 6.
-
Burge, Jeremy. “Google Updates Gun Emoji”. Emojipedia (blog).
- 7.
-
Unicode 17.0.0. “Chapter 1”. Accessed November 22, 2025.
- 8.
-
Davis, Wes. “X Swapped Its Water Pistol Emoji With a Regular Gun, for Some Reason”. The Verge.