The series of violent attacks on New York City Police officers — at least seven last month — is no laughing matter. But the latest attack, in which a prisoner being kept at Kings County Hospital used a bed rail to bash a police office on the head, does points to the limitations of Mayor Bloomberg’s response to the attacks.

That response has been to intone that, as the Daily News quoted him as saying after visiting one wounded officer, “We just have to get guns out of the hands of people with long criminal records. … Here we are again, another night, another hospital, another member of New York’s Finest shot with what appears to be an illegal gun.”

What’s next, for the mayor to mount a campaign against bed rails? Or against plate glass windows, one of which injured another police officer as he crashed through it in the line of duty last month? At least Americans’ rights to bear bed rails and plate glass windows are not enshrined in the Constitution, as the right to bear arms is. What a contrast to the approach displayed by a federal judge in Brooklyn, Nicholas Garaufis, who last week formally sentenced a cop-killer, Ronell Wilson, to death, punishing the criminal for his crime rather than obsessing about the instrument used to commit it.

Where does the mayor stand in respect of the sentence handed down in respect of Wilson? More broadly, the best signal the mayor could send in the face of the attacks on our officers would be to back them up in ambiguous situations. He spoke too soon in the case of the shooting of Sean Bell in Queens and met with the Reverend Al Sharpton and others who seek to undermine support for our officers. Our sense of the situation is that attacks against police officers are going to abate when it’s clear that one can’t use demagogy against them.