You won't be typing the rifle emoji into a text any time soon
If you prefer emoji to actual words, you can now read classic works like "Moby Dick," the Bible and Shakespeare's plays - adaptations include "YOLO Juliet" - in pictograms, thanks to enterprising translators and an expanding palette of the little cartoons.
What you will not be able to do is accurately transcribe "The Patriot" or "American Sniper" into emoji, simply because the rifle emoji does not exist. In the arsenal of emoji firearms, it's handguns all the way down. The revolver is one of a few weapons in an emoji vocabulary that contains some 1,800 characters; the recent update to Unicode 9.0 brings 72 new emoji with it. A rifle emoji was planned. It did not make the cut.
In a move spearheaded by Apple and supported by Microsoft, members of the Unicode Consortium decided to nix the rifle at the last minute, according to unnamed sources who spoke with BuzzFeed News. The Unicode Consortium quietly determines which emoji make it into the biggest tech platforms. The nonprofit organization includes some of the major players in Silicon Valley, like Apple, Google and Microsoft. Unlike bespoke emoji that require third-party applications to view - like Kim Kardashian's Kimoji - once introduced, emoji approved by the Unicode group become, essentially, universal.
During Unicode's quarterly meeting in May, two emoji came up for discussion: number U+1F946 - a rifle - and U+1F93B, or "modern pentathlon," which included a man holding a pistol. Both emoji were proposed in anticipation of the 2016 Rio Olympics. Apple, according to an anonymous member of the meeting who spoke to BuzzFeed, argued that the rifle should not be encoded. (The pentathlon and rifle will become characters - black and white pictograms - but will not appear in color in emoji keyboards.)
The suggestion was received unanimously. "Nobody in the room seemed to mind not encoding the rifle," the source said to BuzzFeed.
The decision came prior to the Orlando massacre, and the rifle emoji had been criticized by gun-control groups since the announcement of the image last year. The move is in tone with Apple's reluctance to show violent emoji to users; the gun and knife emoji, though able to be displayed by Apple's computers, were hidden from the Mac operating system's emoji selector, as Ars Technica noted.
American popular culture is widely criticized for its acceptance of violence but prudishness about sexual material. But it seems that when it comes to our emojis, at least, the reverse is true. An April 2015 industry emoji usage survey for the period between October 2014 and January 2015, found that less than 0.3 percent of all emoji sent in the U.S. were handguns. Instead, the U.S. is the world leader in sending the eggplant emoji - which, as a tube-shaped vegetable, frequently suggests what you might think it does.