Anti-2nd Amendment activist group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence has come up with a new mission: to get rid of visual representations of guns in text messages. To this end, they wrote an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and published a video meant to tug at the heartstrings, no doubt.
The melodramatic video (which is just a bunch of sentences flashing on the screen) claims, “There is a gun we all carry. That we can all give up. #DisarmTheiPhone.”
The letter theatrically explains the premise with more words, but still nonsensically: “We realized that many Americans unknowingly carry a gun with them every day. The one that was given to them without a background check: the gun emoji.”
They go on to petition Apple, “We ask that you stand with the American people and remove the gun emoji from all your products as a symbolic gesture to limit gun accessibility.”
So they want to remove the gun emoji…not the real guns that protect people, but a gun emoji. It’s fair to say that most use the emoji in jest, but New Yorkers Against Gun Violence are apparently afraid of even this.
Thus, an anti-2nd Amendment group is being outwardly anti-1st Amendment in their anti-gun position. The petition isn’t about getting rid of guns, but getting rid of tiny pictures of guns (which, by the way, are optional to use).
This isn’t the first time that Apple has been lobbied to make their emoji’s more PC. In the past year, Apple pushed through an emoji update that gave users the option to use black-faced emojis rather than the clearly racist white ones.
We’ll see if Apple caves under the pressure, but given their bonafide liberal inclinations, it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if the next iPhone update takes away the dreaded mini-gun.
