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He had grabbed a gun and pointed it with the intention to follow through. The rage and hate boiling through his mind in that moment had been a palpable thing so very close to overwhelming him. In the aftermath of the day, with Martha safely dropped back home and Donna fulfilling that oh-so-human need for hours of sleep, he found himself thinking back on it in shame. The memory made him feel physically ill, the cold knowledge of just how very close he had been to crossing over a line. Worse, that particular one was a line he'd sworn his whole life against ever since he chose who he wanted to be – the Doctor. Across the span of years since that defining moment, there were so many things that already haunted him. The memory of the sensation of his own finger trembling on that trigger would now be added to the truly disgraceful ones.
In all those long, long years he has been alive, there always existed a very good reason he'd hardly ever picked up a weapon. It was too easy, when you had a gun in your hand, to think like a man with a gun in his hand. Part of him felt like a Timelord from the planet Gallifrey should be better than that, above the kinds of baser impulses these humans gave in to all the time. Maybe the others of his race had been, maybe it was just him that was capable of becoming so perilously out of control. With the Time War – well, it didn't matter, really. They were all gone now and what they might have once thought or done was irrelevant. As arrogant as all his human friends seemed to think he could be, he knew he couldn't let himself be deluded into thinking he was better than any one of them in this matter. That was why he knew it was important to avoid the temptation of carrying a weapon at the ready. If it also allowed him to pretend superiority, to act as though he didn't know he could become just as susceptible as any to the temptation to obliterate the opposition with only a twitch of a finger? That was no one else's business so far as he was concerned.
Still, as much as he often allowed his emotions and impulses to rule him – especially this particular version of himself - he was careful. Today may have gone badly, but he'd kept himself from actually doing anything. He had told the people of Messaline to take him as an example of a man who never would and build their society off of it. He'd meant it. He wasn't perfect, and it wasn't a fact that he would never feel the temptation to kill another being. Rage, fear, and hatred were all things he was perfectly capable of feeling even unto the point of wanting to murder. Maybe he wasn't just a man, but he was no kind of god to be beyond temptation. Moreover, he had certainly killed before. Though he tried to avoid thinking on it, more living souls than he could even begin to accurately estimate had met their end as a consequence of one thing or another that he had done. Some by accident, but many more by deliberate design.
Only a few had died when he pointed a weapon and pulled a trigger in such a personal way, but the number was still greater than zero. That wasn't what he meant when he said he never would.
He would hate and sometimes he would actively seek to kill. What he would not and could not do while still being the person he was - and had been for all his years under the more superficial changes - was to do them both together. He would never rejoice in a death, no matter how deserved it was. He would act when he had to in order to prevent a greater tragedy, whatever the cost in lives and his own soul's weight, but he would not act out of hatred and anger or for revenge.
He never would.
Any version of himself that would do so, that could glory in the death of another being, any other being, was no longer him. He was the Doctor, a moniker he had given himself with deliberated purpose. A name that meant someone who helps, who heals, who makes things better. He never would, because the day someone calling himself the Doctor acted out of malice or exulted in death, the man he was would be dead. Anything else was a lie.