The Return of the Gun Emoji Is Better News Than You May Think

Basically [X] just up and changed [the gun emoji] back to a real gun.

This seems like a small thing. It’s not. To say that the cartoon depiction of a gun is unacceptable to display in-text on any modern tech platform is actually pretty radical. It means that the mere sight of a gun — a cartoon gun — is an inherent obscenity. And purely from a software engineering perspective, disregarding the Unicode standard to enforce that was unprecedented.

For six years, we lived in that world. Today, at least on X, we don’t. But imagine that Elon hadn’t bought X and we were stuck with water pistols for the long haul. Most people using a smartphone today remember when a pistol was a pistol. But after about two decades, the collective memory would have faded and the water pistol would seem utterly normal. The real pistol would seem aberrant, and as a result there’d be no hope of bringing it back. There’d be a new status quo, and going back to the old one would seem radical.

What’s normal and what’s stigmatized is really just a function of what you’re used to. With enough habituation, the normal can seem aberrant and the aberrant can seem normal. This cuts both ways for gun culture. There are actually several domains where guns are completely normalized. It’s not clear that that was inevitable. Rerun history 100 times, and you might only get today’s world 50 times:

• • Video games. Guns are everywhere. Games pride themselves on reproducing real-world guns accurately.
  • Film and TV. Ditto.
  • The American self-image. Whether people like guns or not, if they draw a caricature of Uncle Sam, he’s packing heat.
  • Social media. Every single gun account struggles with strikes and bans. But even so, it has never in history been easier to share info about guns and to spread gun culture.

Conversely, there are other areas where guns are fully stigmatized:

• • Children’s media. This isn’t a “you can’t even show Vietnam War movies in kindergarten anymore, what is the world coming to” rant. The very existence of firearms, even as lite comedy, is scrubbed from all children’s media. Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam are empty-handed now. It’s Christmas time, and gifting gun-related stuff to kids used to be utterly normal in media — think “a pair of Hopalong boots and a pistol that shoots is the wish of Barney and Ben” or the fact that in A Christmas Story, Ralphie says 28 separate times that he wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. And don’t even ask about Slowpoke Rodriguez. In 2024, kids cannot find out from their media that guns exist.
  • News coverage. If a gun appears on the news, it’s because it was used in a crime. There’s no such thing as positive gun ownership, let alone gun rights.
  • Social media. One thing Elon’s takeover of X has shown is that instead of putting massive effort into a content moderation system, you can simply … delete most of the rules. On Meta- and Google-run platforms, gun content lives under the sword of Damocles. Between the strictness of the rules and the high rate of false positives, the main effect of the system is to ensure that any gun-related account can be removed at any time.

That’s a description of where things sit today. But it can also serve as a roadmap. Our job now is to double down on the areas where guns are normalized, and to flip the discourse in the areas where they’re stigmatized.

— Open Source Defense in The Gun Emoji and Other Opportunities to Reset What’s Normal