Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

On April 22, 2026, I participated in a virtual discourse hosted by Jennifer Mascia of The Trace , featuring Mark Barden (Co‑Founder of Sandy Hook Promise) and filmmaker Josh Seftel . The session focused on Seftel’s documentary All the Empty Rooms and the broader sociological impact of firearm‑related trauma in the United States. It was especially valuable to hear Seftel describe how he selected this project and approached its development and production. Mark Barden’s perspective—as a parent who lost a child in a school shooting—added a level of moral clarity and lived experience that is often missing from policy debates. His discussion of Sandy Hook Promise’s most impactful initiatives underscored the importance of sustained, evidence‑informed advocacy. Narrative evidence of the kind presented in the film provides a qualitative counterweight to the quantitative data typically used in administrative rulemaking or legislative testimony on firearm policy. It also serves as a rea...

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)...