School starts, the summer heat dissipates, pumpkin flavors appear, and the new iPhone update comes out. The common cycle of fall has a new constant with an iOS update. On Sept. 13, 2016 Apple brought a plethora of new features to their products along with a replacement emoji with the iOS10 software update. The old black and silver revolver has now been switched out with a much more innocent toy water gun. Although the emoji switch is almost unnoticeable when looking for things that are new on the update, it evokes a lot of different responses around the halls of Community High School.

The immediate responses from students Colleen Chesky, Ella Ruderman and Annie Noffke was that this is a great revision. “It’s a good thing they changed it because in a way it’s discouraging the possession of guns and the normality of them,” said Ruderman, a proponent of gun control laws.  Guns and gun violence are now everywhere in our lives. They are on the news, TV shows and a part of many popular video games.

“They aren’t just a small deal. They kill people everyday,” Chesky said. She went in further to say that she uses emojis to lighten up a text, and by using a gun as an emoji it makes it a light thing as well.

On the other hand, students Jonathan Corcoran and Patrick Wellman saw the conversion of the gun emoji as a complete overreaction. “I see no harm in the emoji. It’s just about parents freaking out about their kids growing up in this society,” Wellman said. He related this back to his own neighborhood. A playground had recently been remodeled near Wellman’s house, mostly because it was getting old. They took out all the fun stuff and set up your standard playground and labeled it ‘This playground is from ages 5 to 12,’ with a bunch of ‘legal things’ listed on the play structure. “Why does this matter? The kids are going to have to learn and grow up anyhow, so why try to limit that?” Wellman said.

Corcoran agreed with Wellman in that this was an overreaction. “It’s completely pointless. It’s just an emoji and it’s not going to hurt anyone. Also, nobody ever got shot because of an emoji,” Corcoran said.

Ruderman and Noffke dove in deeper. After originally seeing this as a good switch, they thought about it longer and harder and saw it more as a statement Apple was making. “All in all nobody really cares about emojis,” Noffke said. “But if Apple really wanted to make a difference they’d do something like advertising more gun control, or talking out about it. [Instead, Apple says] ‘It’s okay, we are progressive, it’s not like we are upping our prices for our iPhones.’ It’s like a pass for them, they get a pass for doing this. But they aren’t actually being helpful. They just want money and this is a publicity stunt.”