I'm watching Family of Blood after it was repeated again recently. I noticed that when the going gets tough and the baddies started killing everyone, "John Smith" puts the kids at his school to work as soldiers despite Martha saying they were too young.

I hadn't realised before but this is symbolic of the common criticism from enemies who say the Doctor uses his companions to do the killing and in fact deep down he is ready to go to war when he needs to.

Just a random thought .....

There were a few point's which showed that although he was human, his inner personality, although affected by humanisation was still in there, such as saving the lady with the pram in an ingenious way, the flash forward showing he would only die happy when he'd successfully saved everyone close to him, etc. This being the case I feel that he basically followed the usual pattern of what he would do, but in a human way, such as fighting the villains whilst telling the people around him how to help, but being affected by the humanness to think that the way to do that is with guns.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that the essence of his personality was still there so yes, I would think that he got into that situation with the boy's because that is what he always does on that type of situation, albeit with usually non violent means.