Interesting and entertaining article, I enjoyed reading it. Now I want a "Which Emoji Weapons Shoot Real Bullets" . I'm only half joking as many emoji sets transitioned from the depiction of real weapons to some form of toy, like a colorful water pistol. It would be interesting to find out who started it and when the others followed.
Apple started it. For a time, a text like this: > Let’s meet at the park [pistol emoji] Would have have very different meanings between platforms. Eventually, all platforms followed Apple and switched to the water pistol. (The ones that still show real pistols are obsolete fonts.) https://emojipedia.org/pistol At this point, Apple gets to decide what emojis look like, not the Unicode Consortium.
Unicode doesn't decide anything about character appearance. Unicode is just about giving a character a number (among other interesting things for text, like collation, bidirectional text, etc.).