Not sure i get involved but here goes.

So apparently it is officially called pistol, yet most seems to represent a revolver, and the guy insists on calling it the gun emojii, even though the word gun can be used for anything from a bb to .50...

That's because most people will call these things guns ("the suspect had a gun") -- unless it's something obviously special and/or well known (e.g. an Uzi), and sometimes not even then, they don't delve in the minutiae of whether it's pistol, revolver or whatever. Non native english speakers (e.g. 90% of the internet) even more so.

With everybody having a gun in the US, you can't really tell :-)

"Why do you insist on calling this square a rectangle?"

Actually in military use, 'gun' generally refers to larger crew-served weapons, like artillery.

The word 'small arms' is used to describe rifles and hand guns.

'Gun' can also refer to anything from a phaser to a portal gun to a zero point energy manipulation device!

There is no other gun emoji, afaik, so in this case I think gun is unambiguous.

There was a proposal to add a hunting rifle emoji, but apparently due to the trauma of gun violence or something, they decided to remove it from the spec.

Here's an article on its removal: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36576492

Can't wait when this emoji bullshit hype is over. It has esthetics of an unaligned, overscaled <blink> element. Fonts should be strictly limited to monochrome.

You're in for a rough ride.

You would have hated ancient Egypt.

At least it was monochrome... but not always https://warboar.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/color/

Good analogy would be "You'd hate arabic sprinkled with colorful egyptian hieroglyphs" - the answer is, probably I would not like it - it would lack aesthetics.

At least on Firefox you can remove the color emoji font from the installation and you're left with BW symbols.

Now that it's in Unicode, will it ever be over?

Edit: Well, OK, maybe the _hype_ will blow over. Not that I knew there were one. I'm just upset that too many things are accepted into the character set.

> Fonts should be strictly limited to monochrome.

Emoji can be monochrome, and are specified in a way which expressly supports that.

Whenever my coworkers and I are killing off unused code, we do the :horse: :gun: emoji. It's _great_.

I am honestly surprised that frog + gun isn't on the list.

I thought that was the meme that started the thing + gun.

edit: I also discovered that HN comments don't support utf8 emojis

Yeah, I think it's for the best that there's no support for emoji on HN, it's a great relief to me at least.

I'm curious, what unicode sets are supported on Hacker News? Did the creators explicitly decide on certain sets, or was the decision made for them based on their programming environment / database?

I think it's at least the basic multilingual plane, the supplementary multilingual plane, and the supplementary ideographic plane. Maybe not all of each of these. I think many emoji are in the SMP on the 1F000–​1FFFF range, some of the original ones (primarily added to translate proprietary Japanese character sets) are in the BMP.

Hmm. evil plan. Browser plugin (Tampermonkey?) plus user script which brings :smiley: :pistol: and co. to life on HN.

Only potential positive i see is that it allows us to curse like comic book sailors online...

Thanks for the idea, I need to find a good place to use this haha

I have never heard of, or at least attributed any special meaning to frog + gun. What's the meaning?

I think if you give people a picture of a gun they're going to figure out pretty quickly that they can make it "point" at things, no real "meme starter" necessary.

I wonder if weighting by favorites/retweets would change the results at all. Maybe horse+gun would be on there? (http://deadspin.com/rockets-twitter-guy-fired-over-emoji-vio...)

Anecdotal, but it seems that iOS users use the water gun emoji as a normal gun, ignoring the font rendering.

I think it was only changed somewhat recently.

Also some apps load their own emoji, like Facebook and Twitter, so iOS users may be used to seeing/using the normal gun emoji in those apps.