The problem is that my platform is not your platform. And if I send you a water pistol with my phone and you receive a handgun on your PC, it is a problem. So

The problem is that my platform is not your platform. And if I send you a water pistol with my phone and you receive a handgun on your PC, it is a problem. So it makes sense for websites to force the rendering, so that everyone gets the same message. Ideally, that pistol emoji mess shouldn't have started in the first place. It was clearly intended as a real gun, and variations in rendering shouldn't have impacted the meaning, but they did, and that's how we got there. If they wanted to off the real gun for a water pistol, they should have used a different code point, made keyboards only suggest that code point, and maybe censor the original pistol like they do swear words. No ambiguity.