  Gun violence is a critical public health and safety concern in the United
States. There is considerable variability in policy proposals meant to curb gun
violence, ranging from increasing gun availability to deter potential
assailants (e.g., concealed carry laws or arming school teachers) to
restricting access to firearms (e.g., universal background checks or banning
assault weapons). Many studies use state-level variation in the enactment of
these policies in order to quantify their effect on gun violence. In this
paper, we discuss the policy trial emulation framework for evaluating the
impact of these policies, and show how to apply this framework to estimating
impacts via difference-in-differences and synthetic controls when there is
staggered adoption of policies across jurisdictions, estimating the impacts of
right-to-carry laws on violent crime as a case study.
