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18th June 2016
01:44pm BST

The decision was influenced by Apple, one of Unicode's biggest member companies.
The emoji initially passed Unicode's review, but there had been talks of banning the rifle emoji since last October, when a gun-control campaign shared their concerns about the influence emojis now have on people.
Although the decision to officially remove the rifle emoji was made at a meeting in May, it has yielded a lot of attention in recent days due to the shooting in Orlando and the ongoing debate on gun control.
Many commenters have pointed out that the pistol emoji still exists on smartphone keyboards.

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