This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them?
In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere. But the same codepoint showing up as a water pistol to one half of the audience and as a gun to the other seems to be just begging for misunderstandings - and in a charged atmosphere like X no less where this could easily spiral into drama, shitstorms or worse.
In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere. But the same codepoint showing up as a water pistol to one half of the audience and as a gun to the other seems to be just begging for misunderstandings - and in a charged atmosphere like X no less where this could easily spiral into drama, shitstorms or worse.