“An anti-gun organization in New York on Thursday debuted a social media campaign to convince Apple to remove the ideogram depicting a gun from their iPhones,” Chris Eger reports for Guns.com. “New Yorkers Against Gun Violence kicked off their ‘Disarm the iPhone’ drive this week with a website, video and press release targeting the popular mobile devices. The group cautions that the emoji, one of hundreds on the product that come preloaded from the factory, reflects the ready access to guns in the country. ‘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,’ reads an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook.”
“On the site set up for the Disarm the iPhone initiative, NYAGV goes on to repeat the oft-quote statistic that 40 percent of gun sales in America are made without a background check,” Eger reports. “This stale figure often pops up in rhetoric on gun violence in the country and has been widely debunked [as it is ] based on a 1994 telephone survey of 251 people conducted just as implementation of the FBIs NICS system and requirements for background checks for sales through Federal Firearms License holders was coming into effect.”
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MacDailyNews Note: The Unicode Consortium coordinates the development of the Unicode standard which includes Emoji, not Apple.
