On Monday, Mayor Eric Adams said that a story reported last week that claimed he once accidentally fired a gun in school as a child is untrue, attributing the error to a misunderstanding during his weekly press briefing. However, the story in question reportedly came from Adams himself in a book he published 15 years earlier, when he was serving as a state senator in Brooklyn.
The website Byline first reported on the existence of the book last week: a 2009 volume of parental advice entitled Don’t Let It Happen written by Adams. The Amazon listing of the 152-page book describes it as “a life saving resource, designed to assist parents in detecting when their children are involved in an activity that can be harmful to themselves and/or other family members.” The book, published by Xulon Press, can also be found on websites for Barnes & Noble and Walmart.
In its article, Byline featured an excerpt in which then–State Senator Adams recounts a childhood story about a friend who brought a gun to school and Adams, not believing it was real, grabbing the weapon:
When I was a child, a friend of mine brought a gun to school … to show off to the rest of the students. This was my first time seeing a real gun. After years of playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with toy guns, I did not believe the gun he was showing us was real. I laughed at his stupid trick and grabbed the gun from him. ‘If this gun is real,’ I said, ‘then it should go off.’ I pointed what I thought was a toy gun at my group of friends and pulled the trigger. A round discharged, and only by the grace of God and my poor aim did the bullet miss my friends. The incident scared me so much that I dropped the gun and ran.
But when a reporter raised the subject to the mayor on Monday afternoon and even recited the passage in question, Adams denied that it ever occurred.
“I never fired a gun in school,” he said.
Adams said the co-author of the book “may have misunderstood” the actual story and even seemed to suggest that the book itself was never published despite reporters at multiple local outlets managing to purchase it online. The book’s cover, which features an image of an open lunch box with a gun inside, also makes no mention of a co-author.
“There was an incident in school where someone pointed what they thought was a toy gun and they may have misunderstood,” he said. “That book never got into print because we never went through the proofreading aspect of it.”
