Apple and the Gun Emoji

Question for those who are fine with what Apple did: What if Apple had implemented a text filter which changes all occurences of the word “pistol” to “water pistol”. Would that be fine too?

Also, what if the Unicode Consortium later adds an emoji for “WATER PISTOL”? How should it be distinguished from the “PISTOL” emoji? Or should they be identical?

I don't think this is a slippery slope towards text modification.

Note that there are already problems with emoji being different across platforms. Here is a short article from the GroupLens people at the University of Minnesota: http://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-mi...

I'm not a huge fan of Apple's general "safe" content approach either despite being an Apple user, but to me this is a tiny and insignificant political statement relative to all the issues they have with the app store/iTunes content and Beats 1 censorship.