This is five year old thinking. A five year old cannot comprehend gun safety.

[nolabear]

23. Okay. I'll try again.

A five year old boy's mind does not follow logic in the same way an adult's does.

Dad takes Jimmy to the gun range and shows him how to shoot Dad's gun. He says "It's safe and fun and interesting to do this with me but don't ever touch a gun unless I am with you and am showing you how." Jimmy says he understands.

Jimmy is at Johnny's house and Johnny says "My dad's gun is in here. Want to see?" Jimmy says "My dad lets me shoot his gun." Johnny says "Well you can't shoot THIS gun." Jimmy, as with "there is more liquid when it is in the tall beaker but I cannot tell you why", may well believe that his dad wasn't talking about THIS gun (or THIS plug or THIS fork) because he very likely is incapable of thinking that way. Add to that the fact that he very much wants to succeed at doing it and remembering Dad's injunction is extremely hard. It's actually considerably more convoluted than that. If you've ever tried to play a game with a five year old, you realize that the idea of fixed and constant rules is almost ungraspable. They are notoriously poor sports, because their attention isn't long, they're convinced they're winning simply because the desire to win is so strong, and that desire to have what they want is so strong it supersedes the ability to only win by obeying a fixed set of rules successfully.

This begins to change around age seven, and often seven year olds are obsessed with EVERYONE obeying the rules because they are so caught up with this new capacity and its importance.