Crystal Wise
Dr. Daniel Guzman
The most common scene parents witnessed during Dr. Daniel Guzman’s 2020 study was their child looking down the barrel of a gun — an eye fixed on the deep, dark cylinder with a finger resting on the trigger. “It’s disturbing but not surprising,” Guzman says of the study’s findings. Parents watched in horror as their children playfully pointed these weapons at brothers and sisters — or themselves — while manipulating the trigger. Now, before anyone files complaints with local law enforcement, the gun was neither loaded nor able to dispense any projectile. These very real-looking but harmless firearms were part of a study conducted by Guzman, an emergency room physician at Cook Children’s Medical Center, as part of his Aim for Safety initiative, an adamantly nonpolitical program that both promotes gun safety and takes preventative measures to ensure children are not harmed by firearms.
The study placed children in a playroom where three decommissioned firearms were hidden in either a purse, backpack, or box. The room was equipped with cameras so Guzman and the child’s parents could watch the children’s actions from another room. The parents were those Guzman refers to as high risk — people who own firearms, do not have them secure, and have children between the ages of 4 and 12.
Is having such high-risk parents witness what could have been an incomprehensibly tragic event a scare tactic? Sure. But Guzman, who has spent the last five years treating firearm injury as a pandemic, is willing to do whatever it takes to make even a single parent purchase and use a lock box for their firearms.
“The only way I felt that I could reach those people without, gosh, shaking them, I guess, was to show them what could happen.”
Guzman says between 85% and 90% of children did not do the right thing, which the pediatrician describes as “Stop, don’t touch, leave the room, and tell an adult.” Only one out of the first 21 children who participated in the study actually did this.
“I hate to say it’s a shock-and-awe moment, but to some extent, there is that component to it,” Guzman says. “I want parents to see [their child’s actions], go ‘Oh, my gosh,’ take a deep breath, and say, ‘We’ve got to do something different.’”
Unlike a real-life scenario, which this study replicates with disturbing accuracy, no one gets hurt. The child picks up the gun, looks at it, pulls the trigger, and nothing happens to them. The parents get a do-over.
“As a parent, you see that, if it was real, it would’ve been the most devasting incident in their life,” Guzman says. “And so now, they get an opportunity to say, ‘All right, I’m going to do something different.’”
Moments of epiphany — scientific, religious, personal, or philosophical discoveries of greater meaning — come to us at seemingly random moments. We’re never aware of the day, hour, circumstances, or events that may surround these sudden flashes. For Guzman, it occurred in 2017 when he saw a 3-year-old child who had shot himself accidentally with a firearm come through the emergency room.
Guzman describes this as a turning point. This was when he transformed into one of the state’s most active advocates for firearm safety. He’s now routinely seen at schools, online, and at public events speaking earnestly about gun safety and giving demonstrations. A physician who has seen firsthand the horrors and tragic, life-changing consequences of firearm accidents, has become the face of this apolitical movement.
As Guzman tells it, it was years in the making — perhaps even decades. The combination of his experience; his platform as a doctor in an emergency room at a children’s hospital; and the fact that he is a gun owner, parent, and grew up around firearms made him the perfect candidate to reach the audience he desired. He felt he could relate to and tap into the wishes — and fears — that gun-owning parents might have. Guzman understood the last thing they wanted to hear was anything about stricter gun laws, regulations, or abolishment of the Second Amendment.
Why? Because these are things Guzman doesn’t want to hear himself. Growing up in Texas, Guzman says he’s been around firearms all his life.
Guzman was born in South Texas — the Rio Grande Valley — in a small town called Donna. A population of 7,500 when he was growing up, (the city now has a population of 16,409, according to the latest census), the community had few speeding cars and little crime. His upbringing, which included few restrictions, has made Guzman sympathetic toward a parent’s instinct to allow their children to have freedom.
“I never worried about any of the things that we worry about today that, as a parent, I worry about,” Guzman says. “Whether my parents really understood or knew the potential consequences of what I was doing and what was going on, who knows? If they let me just have my freedom and let me run and roam, I think that was obviously important for my growth as a kid.”
Guzman was the son of a candy distributor and wonders aloud how, given the amount of sugary substances he consumed in his pre-teen years, he’s kept all of his teeth and doesn’t weigh 500 pounds. “Now, diabetes, that may be a different thing altogether,” Guzman jokes.
Despite his genealogy being directly connected to bonbons, lollipops, and other cures for the sweet tooth, Guzman knew he wanted to enter the medical field at a young age. He recollects that he was 4 or 5 years old when he went to ophthalmologist and received his first pair of glasses. It was this noninvasive trip to the eye doctor that opened Guzman’s eyes, if you’ll pardon the pun, to the world of medicine.
“I didn’t like going to the doctor because every time I went to the doctor, you got a shot,” Guzman says. “But [going to the ophthalmologist] was a very cool. It was noninvasive and [the doctor is] doing stuff and making things better.”
Through his primary education, high school, college, and even the first part of medical school at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Guzman never wavered from his desire to, as he put it, set the ophthalmology world aflame. But, like most childhood ambitions, things wound up going astray.
The limited world of ophthalmology no longer appealed to Guzman. While acknowledging the importance of eyes, he felt like there was more he could do. It wasn’t until his pediatric rotation in medical school that he realized where he should be.
“[When I was in pediatrics], that’s when I realized, ‘I love this. This is fun. I get to be a kid, play with kids, and enjoy that aspect of it and never grow up truly,’” Guzman recalls. “You can probably tell I got old. I’m still the same way to some extent. And all of my colleagues in the ER will tell you I still haven’t grown up yet, which I think is important.
“I think with what we deal with every single day in the ER, it’s important to understand who you are, where you come from, and just how unique a change and difference we can make. Although albeit it may be small at times, but if you just reach one person, I’ve learned that’s enough. If you can just touch one life, you’re making a difference. If you can make that one family feel like they were the only person in that ER, then I’ve done my job.”
It’s a cliché: Doctors become calloused to the gruesome things they see daily. After years of practicing medicine, the constant sight of death and illness hardens them to these painful realities. But Guzman has gone the other way.
After his mother passed away from kidney failure 12 years ago, it opened his eyes to what it was like to be on the other end of the bad news and, as a family member, having to make very different and difficult decisions. His newfound relatability is something earned.
“[When I first started practicing], I was really distant,” Guzman says. “I was there for families, but there wasn’t that connection that I would make, especially in those situations where you have someone who’s passed away. You just want to run from those situations almost every single time. But now, I’m taking that head on. I’m in there with the families more. I’m talking to the families and helping them understand and know that there’s somebody there for them. I’m not just someone who came in and said, ‘Your child has passed away. We did this, that, the other, and now they’re gone.’
“I’m there to really help them through the process and get them started on a journey that nobody can ever imagine.”
In a single day in September of 2019, Guzman had to speak with the parents of five different children who had been unintentionally shot in four separate incidents. According to an article written in the Dallas Morning News, veteran staff said they couldn’t remember a day like that in the hospital’s history.
The day, which occurred two years after the physician launched his Aim for Safety program, was a gut punch. “You feel like you’re doing so much, but then you have these days that just fall out of the sky like this,” Guzman told the Dallas Morning News. “You’re like, ‘What happened? What are we doing wrong that we can’t fix this or help make this better?’”
Ultimately, Guzman uses these moments to console and educate.
“I can’t, as a parent, ever imagine having to go through that in my life. It’s those moments where you sympathize with the families, you empathize with those families, and you know that they’re going to blame themselves for years to come.”
While Guzman is in the trenches in the Cook Children’s Medical Center emergency room — routinely seeing children who have already been injured — he surprisingly considers himself an injury prevention doctor. Only, his style of prevention doesn’t include vaccinations or prescription medication.
Instead, Guzman shares his experiences in an effort to strike a chord with parents. If he speaks to them about the horrors he sees on a regular basis at the ER at Cook Children’s, he can make a bigger impact.
In 2017, Guzman, in partnership with Cook Children’s Medical Center, launched the Aim for Safety program. The program educates, through marketing materials and frequent public appearances, parents and children alike about firearm safety in an effort curb unintentional gun injuries and deaths.
Guzman looks at firearms as a real pandemic. Relating firearm injuries to COVID-19, Guzman speaks frankly about how we treat the idea of losing children almost every day to the disease and how it differs from those we lose to guns. Vaccines and preventive measures are at the forefront of keeping our children healthy and safe. Why not apply the same formula to gun safety, Guzman argues. The only difference is one deals with vaccines, while the other with lock boxes and education. Deaths from gun accidents and COVID-19 are both preventable.
According to the most recent statistics, accidents related to firearms accounted for 535 deaths in 2020. In Texas, there are 725,368 registered guns. And, with 40% of all households having children under the age of 18, we can surmise that children could have access to over 290,000 guns in the state.
On a more local level, last year, the Cook Children’s Medical Center had 65 total injuries and five deaths related to firearm accidents.”
The irony, of course, is that most people own guns for safety. They view these weapons as instruments to keep them and their families safe. And Guzman is adamant that the Aim for Safety program is not political — in fact, using a big portion of our conversation to diffuse any such notion.
“I’m not here to take away your guns,” Guzman says. “I’m not here to say whether you should have a gun or not. Just like we’re not here from an injury prevention standpoint to say you should have a pool or you shouldn’t have a pool.
“I’m sure there were just as many injuries 30, 40 years ago than there are now. We just didn’t hear about it and know about it. And so that definitely has changed how I think people view it and view gun safety, and it’s become a real political topic.”
According to Guzman, for a long time, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that if you have children, you shouldn’t have firearms. While there’s no evidence that this remains its stance, the AAP’s website does make it clear that its advocacy for gun violence prevention includes championing stronger gun laws.
“The idea of taking guns away turns people off immediately. No one wants to hear that. I don’t want to hear that.”
As a gun owner himself, Guzman is clearly reading the room and understanding his audience. The best tactic is not to advocate for a change to gun laws but to educate gun-owning parents and their children.
“I always try to meet people in the middle,” Guzman says. “If you feel like you need to have a gun, it needs to be on your person where you have control. When you put that gun down, it should go into a safety box, a lock box, or your home safe where someone else can’t access that gun. That’s the discussion. That’s the meeting people at a place where it makes sense.”
Guzman admits that it’s difficult to convince someone who’s used to keeping a gun on their nightstand to suddenly begin keeping that weapon and its ammunition in two separate locked boxes — the gold-standard measures that Aim for Safety recommends.
“That’s just a hard impasse. A hard bridge to cross for some. And so, we find the best way to kind of get to the middle.”
On whether recent changes to the Texas open carry law have had an effect on firearm-related injuries to children, Guzman says the hospital hasn’t seen any changes, saying the prevalence of guns hasn’t changed due to the law — guns were already so prevalent in the state.
In addition to the marketing efforts surrounding Aim for Safety, Guzman is also involved on the grassroots level, going to school, speaking to children and parents. He has complex toolkits that include ballistic gels that he shoots BB guns and pellet guns into that give perspective and understanding as to how far an average pellet gun can penetrate. Such demonstrations lead to shock and awe from kids and adults alike, none previously knowing that a BB from a Red Rider BB gun can penetrate the skin up to four inches.
BB and pellet guns also fly under the radar. Guzman is quick to point out that anything with a projectile has the possibility of hurting someone else — even a water gun. These are things that can put an eye out, literally.
Guzman speaks frequently about wanting to do more. A quick search of the phrase “do more” in the transcript of our interview brought up 35 results. When it comes to protecting children from unintentional firearm injury, Guzman sees this as his calling. So, whatever it is he’s currently doing — making public appearances, writing, conducting studies, or accepting interviews with local magazines, it’s never enough. And he understands that he’ll be in a perpetual quest for new preventative measures … new vaccines against unintentional firearm injuries and deaths, if you will.
“I’m doing a lot of good, but I can do more.”
How to make firearms safe(r)
1 Understand your kids, their age, and their maturity. Cognitively, are they able to understand what it means to have a firearm and what the dangers are that they possess? “You have video games, movies, and television shows that glorify some of these things,” Guzman says. “And kids can’t separate that. They don’t understand that shooting somebody on TV or in a game, they get another life. In real life that doesn’t happen.”
2 Knowing that it’s your responsibility as a parent that you need to keep firearms safely away from children. It’s also important to make children aware of what they should do should they come across a firearm. You should teach your children these four critical steps: Stop, don’t touch it, get away, and tell somebody.
3 When your kids go to another home, whether it be a friend or family member, it’s important to ask whether they have firearms. And, if they do, are they secured? “[When having these conversations], I always tell families to base it in what their kids will do,” Guzman says. “I’ll tell families, ‘My 8-year-old is so curious. You let him loose in a house with friends, he’s going to go through every space. I want to make sure he’s safe, and I want to make sure that the other children are safe.’”
4 Safe storage is the final key component. As a firearm owner, Guzman says, it’s their responsibility to keep weapons that aren’t immediately in his or her possession in a locked box. “Now, the gold standard would be gun and ammunition are separate and go into different boxes,” Guzman says. “I know that’s a big ask and a big hurdle for a lot of families, but it’s the best way to keep your children the safest.”
