The only emoji that was a redesign of an existing emoji was the squirt gun. In fall, when the new version of its operating system rolls out, what was previously a pistol emoji will be replaced by a green squirt gun. It's not the first time Apple has opted against a gun emoji: In June, Apple asked the Unicode Consortium to exclude a scoped shooting rifle from the upcoming set of emojis. In this case, Apple is reinterpreting how it will "read" the pistol emoji. As a tech company, Apple doesn't have an obvious stake in the gun control debate.

Source: Los Angeles Times August 03, 2016 15:45 UTC