Wat. I'm pretty damn sure StarSlayer was being sarcastic, Dragon.
Maybe he was, I can't really tell (I don't usually use sarcasm on internet because of this problem). It sounds plausible to me, kids do the weirdest things. Anyway, I was serious.
I did have some problems telling fiction from reality, though often, this would simply take form of asking stupid questions. I'm pretty sure my younger brothers had it too, but it's hard to tell for anyone but myself. So it can happen, though I was hardly a normal child (so don't tell me about "diagnosed psychological disorders"
I was diagnosed with a lot of stuff). None of us knows this kid, so it's hard to say for certain. Psychology isn't physics, any general statement is going to have numerous exceptions to it, people are just that diverse.
Regardless of that, deep immersion "playing" can have similar results, especially if a kid doesn't know just how serious matter a gun is. It's rather natural that kids are interested in things their parents use, especially if they also appear in some media. For example, I loved messing with our cars, though thankfully, aside from turning on the turn signals, spilling the power steering fluid misaligning the seats and mirrors and honking the horn (rarely, because parents quickly chased me out if I did that
), I couldn't do much with it. There's no telling what I would've done if the keys were in the ignition, but they weren't (or if the parking brake was easier to release...). Of course, re-enecting "car scenes" from cartoons was a common pastime of both me and my sister. Now that I think of it (and remember how silly I used to be), it's perfectly possible that he was also "playing the guncraft guy" or something like that. I can certainly imagine myself doing that, if I wasn't specifically instructed to keep off the gun (I usually listened when told to keep clear of something dangerous. The "forbidden fruit" never really appealed to me).
Someone will most likely say it's all anecdotal evidence, but since I'm postulating this is possible, one example is enough. Unless somebody who knows the kid in question really well posts here, we'll never know what he was thinking. I think the kid's father is mostly right in this case, simply because he would know his child better than any of us. His explanation certainly sounds plausible to me.