On Thursday afternoon, the House Democratic Gun Violence Prevention Task Force released a framework document laying out fifteen proposals for gun violence prevention legislation. It’s a good document, reaching beyond the mainstay proposals like an assault weapon bans to less heralded, but equally important issues like restrictions on the federal government’s ability to help state and local police track local guns. But the most unique proposals in the framework are also some of the ones most in need of improvement: its recommendations for supporting local efforts against gun violence.

Other recent gun violence proposals (like those from President Obama and Sen. Dianne Feinstein [D-CA]) have focused primarily on increased direct federal legislation. The Task Force proposal also contains significant federal proposals, but amps up the focus on how the federal government can support innovative state and local initiatives to reduce gun violence. It’s a smart approach — NRA-sponsored legislation limits both local ability to regulate guns and efforts to research their effects, but what evidence we have suggests state and local efforts really can make a dent in gun violence. A study of 54 cities, for example, found that ones with tighter and better enforced gun laws substantially reduced the diversion of guns to criminals.

The Task Force’s approach to local enforcement involves highlighting smart local initiatives and supporting them. For example:

1. Comprehensive, public health youth gun violence initiatives. The Task Force rejects “tough on crime” approaches to youth violence that involve the mass incarceration of kids in favor of “comprehensive, evidence-based prevention and intervention programs directed toward at-risk youth” created by “representatives from local law enforcement, schools, court services, social services, health and mental health services, businesses, and other community organizations.” This appears to be a reference to the “public health” gun violence reduction approach enacted in, among other places, Boston and Minneapolis, which has saved hundreds of lives that might have been claimed by gunfire.

2. Criminal firearm disposal. “Over time, gun owners may lose their eligibility to possess a weapon under state or federal law, often because of criminal activity or mental health issues. Innovative programs designed to facilitate the disposal of firearms held by prohibited persons can prevent gun violence,” the Task Force notes. It goes on to suggest that “the federal government should encourage states to create and utilize programs that allow local law enforcement to assist gun owners who do not have the legal capacity to own them, in the sale or transfer of their illegal firearms.”

3. Community-level gun reduction. The Task Force recommends that “Congress should take measures to encourage state and local governments to use federal funds” to support “various strategies to better engage local communities in removing illegal or unused guns from their neighborhoods, such as illegal gun tip hotlines and voluntary gun buyback programs administered by municipalities or local law enforcement.” This sort of clarity (it even goes on to name specific federal funds that could be used for this purpose) could improve the Task Force’s other suggestions for local law enforcement.

Unfortunately, not all of these proposals for improved local gun action are accompanied by proposals for how the federal government can actually accomplish those ends ends. While the second of the above suggestions does, neither the first nor the third clarifies how, exactly, it plans to use federal law to encourage states, cities, and counties to adopt the outlined approach. Expressing support in the abstract is nice, but absent some kind of federal program providing financial or some other sort of assistance to locales, it’s won’t do very much.

Lack of concrete action for its local support plans isn’t the only problem in the recommendations — for example, its section on “increased prosecutions of persons who violate federal firearms law” focuses more on gun purchasers rather than the real problem, crooked gun dealers willing to sell to criminals. But overall, the proposals are excellent steps in the right direction.

Monday afternoon, President Obama will deliver his first speech on a tour promoting his plan to reduce gun violence in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The choice of location is anything but accidental: Minneapolis has, in recent years, developed a progressive, highly effective approach to gun violence prevention that has seen firearm crime plummet.

As in most places in the United States, violent crime in Minneapolis peaked in Minneapolis in the mid-90s — 1995, to be precise, two years after the national peak. Minneapolis’ murder rate was bad even for the early-90s crime epidemic, earning the city the name “Murderapolis.” So it was particularly worrisome that, while most of the country was enjoying a “steady and spectacular decline” in violent crime from the mid-90s going forward, Minneapolis’ firearm crime rate began to tick back up around 2000. By 2006, homicide was “the leading cause of death for young people in the city.” The kids were mostly being killed by guns.

In 2006, Mayor R.T. Rybak (who’s still in office today) and the city council voted to designate youth violence as a “public health” problem rather than simply an issue for law enforcement, an approach pioneered in Boston in the 90s. The public health approach suggests that youth violence is caused principally by a surrounding environment — lack of adult support, economic incentives to join gangs, easy access to guns — rather than “bad kids” who need to be locked away. The point is to identify the environmental causes in the same way one might identify, say, pollution as a cause of lung disease, and then develop appropriate treatments.

Rybak and the council created a “steering committee” that would attempt to align Minneapolis police, public health, and social work problems in a joint effort to address the public health roots of the crime problem. The end result was a document titled “Blueprint for Action: Preventing Youth Violence in Minneapolis,” which laid out four principles and 34 concrete recommendations based on them for addressing the youth violence problem. The principles were 1) ensuring all youth have access to trusted adults through things like city-funded mentoring programs, 2) help incentivize youth who are “at-risk” for committing violence through things like city job programs, 3) help reorient kids who’ve already committed violence through steps like orienting probation around reintegrating youth into the community rather than surveillance, and 4) working against the broader culture of violence by, among other things, “seeking stronger penalties for people who sell and distribute illegal guns.”

And it worked. Jon Roesler, an epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Public Health who studies deaths from gun violence, told ThinkProgress that “If there’s one thing [that caused youth gun violence to decline] –- and of course, there’s never one thing –- but if there’s one thing, it’d be [the Blueprint].” Violence did, indeed, decline: here’s a chart of hospitalizations for “assaultive” gun wounds in Minneapolis:

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