New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams is likely to be the next mayor of the Big Apple and, as noted yesterday, he’s already made it clear he’s on the gun control bandwagon. That’s hardly surprising for a New York Democrat.

However, as a former police officer, he really should know better. After all, as a cop, he should recognize how little all of New York’s gun control actually did to prevent crime.

Yet, he either doesn’t get it or doesn’t care. That’s bad.

It’s not as bad, however, as his hypocrisy when it comes to who those laws should apply to.

Eric Adams, who recently won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City and is therefore expected to succeed Bill de Blasio in January, yesterday agreed with CNN’s Jake Tapper that his party’s obsession with banning so-called assault weapons reflected “misplaced” priorities. Yet as a state senator, Adams supported an expansion of New York’s “assault weapon” ban, a purely symbolic law that has been widely flouted and has done nothing to reduce gun violence. Worse, the former police captain’s role in that legislation illustrated his view that current and retired cops should not have to follow the gun rules that apply to the rest of us.

While interviewing Adams on State of the Nation, Tapper noted that the firearms targeted by “assault weapon” bans account for a small share of homicides, which are far more likely to be committed with ordinary handguns. “Do you think the priorities of national Democrats may have been misplaced?” he asked. “Yes, I do,” Adams replied. “I believe those priorities, they really were misplaced.”

Adams did not seem to think so in 2013, when he and his colleagues hurriedly approved a gun control bill that Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. The New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (NY SAFE) Act broadened the definition of “assault weapons” to include semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines and have any of seven prohibited features. As usual with such laws, the logic of that list was hard to fathom. An adjustable stock, a threaded barrel, or a bayonet mount, for instance, does not make a rifle any deadlier, but such features are enough to make the rifle illegal in New York.

…

Adams was outraged by the seven-round limit, but only because legislators had neglected to include an exception for active-duty and retired law enforcement officers. “You can’t give more ammo to the criminals,” he said, explaining the need for a corrective amendment exempting him from the seven-round limit. Norman Seabrook, president of the New York City Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, elaborated on Adams’ point:

As a law enforcement officer for over 20 years, I understand the importance of instituting a new policy on mandating the limits of bullets that a regular citizen can possess, but as a matter of fact the bad guys are not going to follow this law….The way the current legislation is drafted, it actually handcuffs the law enforcement community from having the necessary ammunition needed to save lives. We must not allow this to happen.

In other words, since it was obvious that criminals would ignore the seven-round limit, it would be reckless to make “the law enforcement community” follow it. But “regular citizens” did not deserve the defensive advantage that Adams demanded for himself. He literally voted to put himself above the law, unashamedly demanding a double standard that sent a clear message to his fellow New Yorkers: My life is worth more than yours

In other words, Adams not only supporting an assault weapon ban he now claims is part of a misguided notion, but he also opposed the seven-round limit applying to law enforcement officers.

That last sentence sums it up perfectly.

Now, let’s be clear. Former law enforcement officers are likely to have enemies. They arrest bad people and sometimes those bad people take it personally. I get it.

However, some of us non-officers have enemies as well. Most cops don’t wake up one morning to find their social media feeds filled with death threats. They don’t see their notifications made up entirely of people hoping your children die in a mass shooting simply because you disagree with their solutions to a given problem.

I have and so have a lot of other people. Should we be limited to just seven rounds because we didn’t wear a badge, even though we may have even more enemies?

Hardly.

Adams is a hypocrite when it comes to guns. That really shouldn’t surprise us. I just would have hoped he wouldn’t be so blatant about it.