Though there is a pistol emoji, soon you won’t see a rifle emoji anymore. The Unicode 9.0 which is all set to release on June 21st will allow you to use avocado, bacon, selfie, shrug, drums, disturbing clown, face palm and pregnant emoji. According to the Buzzfeed’s Friday reports, Unicode Consortium in a meeting conducted in the month of May has unanimously voted to strike out rifle emoji from the new emoji candidates in 2016.
The tech giants Microsoft and iPhone manufacturer, Apple argued against this decision. Finally the debut of this emoji is dropped. According to reports Apple being the member of the consortium has influenced the decision of removing both pistol and modern pentathlon (A man firing a pistol) from the new emoji candidates. Besides Apple and Microsoft other tech giants like Google, Facebook and Yahoo are also the members of the movement. Apple has reportedly said that it is not going to support this emoji on its platforms.
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Well, the reason behind the decision of removing the emoji from the list is not clear. But according to few reports this decision is appropriate at this time, after the mass shooting in Florida that left 49 people dead. The insensitive shooter, who belongs to an Islamic state has reportedly purchased his weapons legally.
The Unicode 9.0 will add 72 new emoji and it explains that the rifle emoji was originally suggested as part of a collection of Olympic-themed images. As soon the release of new emoji is announced, the rifle emoji was objected by a British Gun Control group, “It would be familiarising and popularising the image of a weapon which is not a good idea.” Then Mark Davis, president of Unicode responded to the objections explaining, “Some people are bothered by the inclusion of the rifle as a candidate, but the reason that’s included is because shooting is an Olympic sport.”
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According to the reports, Unicode member who was present at the meeting told Buzzfeed the decision shows that major tech companies are “truly realizing what a big deal these emojis are.”
