NEW YORK — A newly unearthed book penned by Mayor Eric Adams includes a passage about how he accidentally fired a gun in school as a child — but the mayor said Monday that the incident never happened, and he blamed an unnamed co-author for mischaracterizing it.
“I never fired a gun in school,” Adams told reporters at his weekly City Hall press briefing after being asked about the firearm-related section from the 2009 book “Don’t Let It Happen.”
“The co-author of the book may have misunderstood,” he continued. “There was an incident in school; someone pointed what they thought it was a toy gun. … That book never got into print because it never went through the proofreading aspect of it.”
Neither Adams nor his spokespeople would identify the co-author.
Despite Adams’ comment, “Don’t Let It Happen” was published in August 2009 by Xulon Press and is still available for purchase. The book, a copy of which was reviewed by the New York Daily News, first resurfaced last week when Byline, a web-based literary magazine, ran an article about it.
Published when he was a state senator representing Brooklyn, Adams’ book is a self-help manual designed to help parents detect “when their children are involved in an activity that can be harmful to themselves and/or other family members,” according to a description on Amazon. The book includes a foreword written by Tracey Collins, Adams’ longtime partner, who co-owns an apartment with him in Fort Lee, N.J.
Chapter eight of the book is titled “Guns” and opens with this anecdote: “When I was a child, a friend of mine brought a gun to school to show off to the rest of the students. … 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.”
After Monday’s briefing, Adams spokesman Charles Lutvak wouldn’t clarify what exactly was wrong about the anecdote. But he said “the book should not have been published.”
Later Monday, Lutvak said, “The mayor has already contacted the publisher, who is working to take the book out of circulation.”
