From Body Counts to Peace Streaks: The New Science of Shooting-Free Days
This post examines a new public-health metric—Shooting-Free Days (SFDs)—as an alternative to traditional crime counts. Drawing on a recent JAMA Health Forum study, it highlights how SFDs reveal patterns of community resilience and temporal clustering in gun violence. The findings show dramatic differences across cities and a national decline in SFDs over time. This shift in measurement reframes how policymakers and researchers understand safety, risk, and intervention.
An interesting new article in the JAMA Health Forum proposes an alternative metric for tracking gun violence trends: "shooting-free days"
The Core Argument
The authors argue that traditional metrics—such as annual homicide rates or nonfatal injury counts—are inherently negative and fail to capture the daily lived experience of community resilience. Instead, they propose four novel metrics to quantify safety:
Shooting-Free Days (SFDs): Total days in a year with zero shootings.
Shooting Death-Free Days (SDFDs): Total days with zero firearm fatalities.
Consecutive Shooting-Free Days (CSFDs): The length of "streaks" without violence.
Multiple Shooting-Free Days (MSFDs): Days with fewer than two shooting incidents.
Key Findings
The researchers analyzed a decade of data across 10 major U.S. cities. The results revealed a stark disparity in urban safety and a troubling national trend:
The Best and Worst: San Diego emerged as the safest, averaging 291.5 shooting-free days per year. Conversely, Chicago had the lowest frequency, with only 1.6 shooting-free days annually.
A Downward Trend: Nationally, these metrics have worsened over the last decade. On average, U.S. cities lost nearly 5 shooting-free days per year, with a significant "pullback" in safety observed during the 2019–2021 period.
The Outlier: Jacksonville was the only city to show a statistically significant improvement in one metric (Multiple Shooting-Free Days).
Conclusion and Impact
The study concludes that "shooting-free days" should be integrated into public health dashboards. By highlighting periods of success rather than just failure, city officials can better motivate communities, sharpen political accountability, and identify specific timeframes where interventions (like "violence interrupters" or greening vacant lots) are most effective. Ultimately, Branas and his team suggest that by measuring peace, we are better equipped to protect it.
In the world of law and criminology, we have spent a century obsessed with the breaking point—the moment the law is violated. We build our entire legal architecture around the "event." But as Branas points out, by only counting the bullets, we've ignored the silence. Maybe the answers we have been seeking all this time lay not in studying what went wrong on violent days, but the mechanics of the days where nothing happened at all.
Citation for the article: Branas CC, Plumber I, Bennett R, Landes O, Rajan S. Shooting-Free Days as a New Metric of Success in Reducing Firearm Violence. JAMA Health Forum. 2026 Mar 6;7(3):e260078. doi: 10.1001/jamahealthforum.2026.0078. PMID: 41823961; PMCID: PMC12988442.
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