On July 30, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence (NYAGV) launched a campaign to pressure Apple into removing the popular pistol-shaped emoji from the iPhone platform.
NYAGV believes Congress will pass more gun control if Apple removes the emoji. Thus, a video accompanying the campaign says that by removing the emoji, Apple can “show [that] America wants stricter access to real guns.”
Because the overarching goal of the campaign goes beyond the emoji, and looks instead to securing more gun control in Congress, the disarmtheiphone.com website is rife with the kind of gun control propaganda one usually hears from Gabby Giffords, Shannon Watts, or Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV).
For example, the site tells visitors that “62% of online sellers are willing to sell guns to people who can’t pass background checks.” The source for this claim? A 2013 article fromMother Jones. Disarmtheiphone.com also informs website visitors that someone dies from a gun-related injury every “17 minutes.” They draw this claim from a January 2013 Huffington Post article.
It is interesting to note that disarmtheiphone.com does not mention Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck’s scholarly work which shows a minimum of 760,000 defensive handgun uses a year. That breaks down to approximately 2,082 DGUs a day. Figures like this go a long way in explaining why Americans love their guns and gun rights.
by Awr Hawkins
