Credit: Mashable It's not clear exactly why Apple objected to the emoji but, as BuzzFeed points out, the characters had already faced criticism from gun control activists in the UK. Even though ...

And companies like Apple added it to their platforms. Most of them created realistic designs for the emoji, modeled after real-life pistols. While Microsoft’s looked more like a ray gun from a ...

Apple apparently used its influence with Unicode to prevent two emoji with guns in them from appearing in the update, according to an earlier report in BuzzFeed. The Unicode 9.0 update ...

Apple’s change of this design was a response to a number of court cases that were beginning to emerge, where the gun emoji was being looked at as whether it constituted a threat.” And because ...