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Mayor David Miller was on to a good thing earlier this year when he put out the call to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to enact a nationwide ban on handgun ownership. The cause was righteous and the timing impeccable.

Handguns, after all, are tools purpose-made for killing people. And in early January, one of those handguns - a legally owned handgun in possession of its owner - was used to that purpose, shooting dead John O'Keefe, a man by all accounts well-loved by friends and family whose only failing was walking up Yonge Street after sharing a couple of drinks with an old friend.

When Miller made the call for the handgun ban, Toronto was on his side. And when he made that call formal at a packed executive committee meeting, and again at council, it's hard to imagine a more unifying cry for the leader of a city that has buried too many people felled by bullets even if it was, at the time, an impotent cry relying on the good graces of a federal government so unsympathetic to both Toronto and the anti-gun lobby.

Miller did promise the city would come up with its own plan to control and discourage gun ownership in Toronto.

This week, however, as the shape of that plan emerged, the crusade might just be about to stumble.

The plan, according to Miller, is intended to make Toronto the least friendly place for handguns in the country. Trouble is, as it stands, it casts its net widely and is in danger of making Toronto unfriendly to a range of activities that have nothing to do with crime.

Under the proposed plan, the city would be rezoned to prohibit the manufacture, distribution and discharge of handguns anywhere. That wouldn't stop existing manufacturers and distributors but it would prevent any new ones.

It would also zone out shooting ranges and it would evict two long-standing shooting ranges from two city facilities - the Don Montgomery Community Recreation Centre in Scarborough and an old CN railway police shooting range at Union Station.

The Union Station range is set up for handguns, but the one at Don Montgomery - operated since 1975 by the Scarborough Rifle Association - is not. It's an indoor rifle target range where hobbyists and athletes can shoot single shot .22 calibre target rifles as well as airguns under controlled situations. The athletes there, and at Union Station, are of the Olympic variety, and because Canada funds its Olympic athletes so poorly, that is where they train when they're not working their 9 to 5 jobs that cover their living expenses.

Those athletes, hobbyists and organizers are of course quite cross about this. They point out, correctly, that they are not responsible for any shootings in Toronto, that they more than anyone have an entirely benign use for the firearms they discharge, safely, at paper targets, and they bring up the matter of the Olympics.

Less correctly but just as forcefully, many of them raise old arguments in favour of private handgun ownership, pointing out that legal gun owners must take great care to safely store their weapons, singling out John O'Keefe's death as an anomaly and dismissing a private handgun ban as political smoke and mirrors.

By itself, that last argument is easy to dismiss. But tied to a broad prohibition that jeopardizes the careers of Olympic athletes? If this persists, the Toronto mayor on the right side of the issue becomes easy to dismiss as a heavy-handed autocrat. And the long game of lobbying for the ultimately necessary ban on handguns suffers a fatal loss of credibility.

Hopefully, Miller or someone else on the executive committee will have the wit to rethink those aspects of the plan when it comes to the executive committee next week.