Nothing could express the zenith of political correctness better.

@1: whatevs.

If this is as bad as it gets I think you can deal, bro.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Longer @1, "But if we just had better and more accessible mental health care available, we wouldn't need to make subtle changes and implement common sense reforms in an effort to make our society a safer and less hostile one in which to exist!"

Are your feelings hurt, @1?

@1 can speak for him or herself. Personally, I find it emblematic of how we avoid actually dealing with problems by just mucking around with a few symbolic gestures.

It's just like the thread about Asian actors in movies. Or the whole "controversy" over what female actors get paid. Considering there are men AND women of all races lacking food and/or shelter tonight, whose needs absolutely are not being even remotely considered, you'll pardon me if I'm not the slightest bit interested in the pay scale for glorified trollops or the skin tone of Hollywood Lotharios.

Consider this: some Silicon Valley flak got paid an enormous salary to project manage that squirt gun into being, not to mention the graphics designers and coders who made bot happen and the PR lackey who brought this to our attention.

That is a borderline criminal misappropriation of resources. But the goobers eat this stuff up because they think "Yeah! That'll show the other team!" And then go out and buy more iCrap because they think Apple cares about what they care about.

Remember: corporate persons are all deeply manipulative sociopaths. Yes, even Apple.

I guess I'm the only one who thought the old emoji gun looked like an emoji i.e a toy but ok whatever.

@1

Don't worry. This emoticon will not impact your right to use racial, sexist, and homophobic slurs.

I think Raindrop's statement is quite appropriate, although I can not speak on his motives, or necessarily agree that it is about political correctness.

An empty gesture which solves nothing but makes people feel better about their lack of action AND allows them to think they "scored" one on an imaginary other team?

Sounds quite appropriate for our times, if you ask me.

its FOR THE KIDS, ok? deal.

Microsoft: No realistic gun emoticons, but 6000 hyper-realistic first-person-shooter games.

This could lead to some real misunderstandings... invite your best "green bubble" friend (or an iPhone user that hasn't upgraded) to a nice water fight and they'll receive a much more sinister message!

Also they reversed the direction of the gun. Not sure if there's a standard there, but that could change the meaning of some emoji sentences; the new rightward direction aligns better with subject-verb-object sentence order, if the gun is used as a verb, but maybe some people switch the subject and object when using a verb that puts the subject on the right?

I hope someone at Apple thought of this stuff...