Apple deliberately and unilaterally made the decision to represent this as a water pistol, despite this being clearly not representative of a typical pistol.
It's expected for individual entities implementing the Unicode emoji specification to exercise some amount of artistic merit, but if they're not at least in good faith attempting to represent the same type of object that the specification calls for, they are saying that they do not care about the decision that the Unicode Consortium made to allow emoji to be used to represent objects of that type, and that they should be the ones with the power to choose what can and cannot be said with emoji.
Appel's modification could be disastrous if an Apple user sends a message intending "let's (squirt gun) the kids!" and it's received as "let's (pistol) the kids!"
