That is the intriguing claim made by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith in an appendix to Van Gogh: The Life (Random House, 2011 (hc), 2012 (pb)).
The traditional story has been that he shot himself with a revolver out in the wheat fields where he was painting, and somehow managed to crawl home to die. There are problems with this story, though, in that no revolver was ever found at the location and the wound was at an odd, oblique angle rather than straight on. (The lack of a suicide note is also regarded as problematical, but is less significant, as not all suicides leave notes.)
What has not been generally known is that there were a couple of local teenagers, one of whom liked to dress up as a cowboy and play cowboy games, and owned a revolver that - he thought - did not work. They also liked to hassle the artist. The Saifeh-Smith theory (which is also partially based on stories circulating in the town of Auvers, where it happened, since at least the 1930s) is that there was some kind of inebriated scuffle near the inn and the gun, tragically, proved to work only too well. Van Gogh took all the blame on himself rather than ruin the boys' lives.
http://www.bbc.com/...
http://www.nytimes.com/...
http://www.abc.net.au/...
The van Gogh Gallery considers this an "alternate theory" that is less probable than the traditional version.
What do you think?