While U.S. lawmakers debate stricter gun laws, Apple led a unanimous decision to ban rifles from all emoji keyboards.
The Unicode Consortium, which oversees the "official" emoji character database, agreed to remove a rifle glyph from a June update to the standard keyboard.
Apple reportedly led the push along with Microsoft, saying the existing handgun emoji is sufficient.
The rifle debate dates back to October, when a British gun control group argued "it would be familiarizing and popularizing the image of a weapon, which is not a good idea."
Unicode President Mark Davis told the New York Times, "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."
The rifle was one of many Olympic-themed emoji apparently meant to coincide with this year's Rio games.
Unicode eventually gave in to critics after a secret meeting last May, over a year before a semi-automatic weapon was used in the Orlando nightclub massacre.
"I think what we're seeing here with the rifle, is these big vendors and tech companies truly realizing what a big deal these emojis are," an anonymous Unicode member told Buzzfeed.
"(Emoji) is not a language, but conceivably, it could develop into one, like Chinese did," Davis said last year.
To be clear, the rifle will still appear as a black and white image in the Unicode Character Database. It just won't be included on standard emoji keyboards.
This video includes clips from C-SPAN and images from Twitter and Unicode.
