Elon Musk used an X post on Tuesday to mock technology companies that are too woke to allow users to have an authentic looking gun emoji.
In the post, Musk listed Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and X, showing changes to emojis from 2013 ’til now.
Musk’s post shows a transition from somewhat realistic looking gun emojis in 2013 to emojis that look like Nerf toys or paintball guns 11 years later.
The exception is X’s gun emoji. On X, the emoji looked like a revolver until morphing into a Nerf gun during the mid-range of the Jack Dorsey years. But once Musk bought the platform the gun emoji reverted to looking authentic.
The current X gun emoji is a 1911 pistol, one of the most classic handguns of all time.
Nerfing of the gun emoji matches rise of the woke mind virus, as a core tenet is equating fake harm with real harm pic.twitter.com/Mhx2HjcES9
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2024
Musk’s post shows that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and Facebook, had Nerfed all their gun emojis by 2017.
He mocked this digression as an outgrowth of the “woke mind virus,” which shows itself in “equating fake harm with real harm.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio, a member of Gun Owners of America, and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and has a Ph.D. in Military History. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at
