Chicago Averaged Fewer Than Two Days A Year Without A Shooting Over Entire Decade

Over the course of a full year, all 365 days, only one or two pass in Chicago without a shooting incident. That’s the reality according to a new study that flips the traditional way of tracking firearm violence on its head. Instead of counting gun violence, a team of researchers counted days of peace.

The study, published in JAMA Health Forum, introduces brand-new measurements designed to capture something that annual murder tallies never do: stretches of time when nobody gets shot. Researchers looked at a full decade of data across the 10 largest cities in the United States and found that Chicago averaged just 1.6 shooting-free days per year from 2015 through 2024. On roughly 363 out of every 365 days, at least one shooting incident occurred somewhere in the city.

On the opposite end sat San Diego, which averaged about 291.5 shooting-free days a year, meaning that on most days, no shooting incident was recorded in the city at all. The gulf between these two cities, both among America’s largest, lays bare just how unevenly gun violence is distributed and how differently residents experience daily safety.

Measuring Peace Instead of Gun Violence

For decades, cities have tracked gun violence primarily through one number: annual homicides. That count is grim, familiar, and, according to the researchers, incomplete. It misses nonfatal shootings, which vastly outnumber deaths. It can’t show whether a city strung together a week or a month of calm. And it focuses entirely on failure, offering no way to recognize or build on success.

The research team, led by Charles C. Branas of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, proposed four new metrics. Shooting-free days count the number of days in a year with no shooting incidents at all. Shooting death-free days tally days when no one died from a shooting, even if nonfatal shootings occurred. Consecutive shooting-free days measure the longest unbroken streak of peace a city managed in a given year. And multiple shooting-free days count the days when fewer than two people were shot.

The concept draws inspiration from an idea most Americans have seen without thinking much about it: those signs at construction sites or factories that read “X Days Without an Injury.” Workplace safety programs have long used injury-free day counts to motivate workers and keep attention on prevention. The researchers argue that gun violence deserves the same treatment, a way to track and celebrate progress, not just mourn its absence.

How the Study Tracked Shooting-Free Days

The team pulled data from the Gun Violence Archive, a publicly available database run by an independent, nonprofit research organization that compiles real-time information on shootings across the country from more than 7,500 sources, including police departments, media outlets, and government reports. Prior evaluation of this database has shown that its numbers align with federal and police-based data, and it is currently the only single, multiyear, publicly available source that allows for national, multi-city comparisons at the incident level.

Researchers analyzed every fatal and nonfatal shooting incident recorded in the 10 largest U.S. cities, those with populations exceeding one million, between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2024. Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, were combined into one unit given the structure of the data and the two cities’ proximity, bringing the final count to 10 city groupings. For each city, they calculated their four metrics year by year, then tested whether those numbers were trending up or down over the decade.

A Decade of Worsening Gun Violence Trends

When all 10 cities were pooled together, every single metric got worse over the study period. On average, cities lost about 4.79 shooting-free days per year, meaning that by the end of the decade, there were roughly 48 fewer days without a shooting incident compared to the beginning. Multiple shooting-free days declined even faster, dropping by about 8.37 days per year on average.

A particularly sharp downturn hit between 2019 and 2021, a period that coincided with the well-documented surge in gun violence during the pandemic. All four metrics pulled back noticeably during those years across the board.

Not every city followed the same path, though, and the differences are revealing. Phoenix and Dallas-Fort Worth showed declines across all four metrics, meaning gun violence in those cities measurably worsened over the decade by every new measure the researchers devised. Houston and Philadelphia also saw drops in multiple metrics.

Chicago and San Diego, despite being at opposite extremes, were both relatively stable over time. Chicago’s numbers were consistently terrible, while San Diego’s were consistently strong. Neither city showed a statistically meaningful trend in any direction over the 10 years.

Jacksonville, Florida, stood out as the single city to show improvement in any metric over the study decade. Its multiple shooting-free days increased by an average of 0.84 days per year, a modest but statistically meaningful gain and the only upward trend in the entire dataset. The researchers flagged cities like San Diego and Jacksonville as places whose policies and conditions could be worth examining more closely by cities struggling with far fewer days of calm.

When the numbers were adjusted for population size, the picture shifted slightly but remained consistent. San Diego had the highest rate of shooting-free days per million people, at 207.6, and also led in raw shooting death-free days with an average of 337.6 per year. Jacksonville had the highest per-capita rate of shooting death-free days at 297.9 per million people, while New York City had the lowest such rate at 24.2 per million. Chicago had the lowest shooting-free day rate at 0.6 per million people.

Why Counting Days of Peace Matters

The researchers argue that the way a problem is measured shapes how people think about it, talk about it, and respond to it. Annual homicide counts, they contend, lock public conversation into a cycle of tragedy and failure. They can also be manipulated, purposely overestimated or underestimated, to serve political ends.

Shooting-free day metrics, by contrast, offer what the researchers describe as “a language of resilience and prevention.” Rather than asking how many people died this year, cities could ask how many consecutive days their residents lived without a shooting incident. Rather than competing over who has the lowest murder rate, communities could set goals: extend the longest streak of peace, or push the number of shooting-free days above a meaningful threshold.

The researchers envision these metrics being built into public health and safety dashboards, giving neighborhoods near real-time feedback on whether programs are working. A community group that helps broker a ceasefire could see the results reflected almost immediately in a rising count of peaceful days. City leaders could identify which neighborhoods are sustaining long stretches without violence and study what’s driving that success.

Future research, the team suggests, could calculate these metrics at the neighborhood level on a weekly or monthly basis and combine them with economic and population data to pinpoint what specific programs and policies are behind the cities and communities that are getting it right.

Gun violence in America’s biggest cities got measurably worse over the past decade by all four of the new metrics the researchers tested. But buried in that bleak trend line is a more useful insight: some cities are managing stretches of peace that others are not, and those differences are trackable and potentially replicable. Counting days without shooting incidents won’t stop the next one, but it might finally give communities a way to see, and demand, progress rather than simply bracing for the next headline.

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