Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

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)...