With a Supreme Court ruling expected soon — as early as Monday — in a case that could restore the Second Amendment in New York State, one question is whether Mayor Adams will honor the oath he took to support the Constitution. Hizzoner’s recent remarks suggest that he is already strategizing as to how to evade any high court ruling to strike down the Empire State’s near-total-ban on New Yorkers carrying handguns.

It was shocking to hear the way the mayor, in remarks Thursday, spoke of the pending ruling. What we would have hoped for is a statement that the mayor looked forward to what the Supreme Court would say and, whether it was favorable or not, that the city would abide by the terms the nation’s highest court laid down. Instead, what we got was a mayor sowing fear in a city that is already beset with worries about crime.

“After what we saw the Supreme Court did on abortions,” Mr. Adams said, “we should be very afraid.” He was referring to the leak of the draft of an opinion in Roe v. Wade. He then warned that for our “densely populated community,” the return of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms “could have a major impact.” The city’s “lawyers are looking at it,” he said, and he wasn’t “sleeping on this ruling.” 

When the case was argued, the law came under fire from the high court’s conservative wing. Chief Justice Roberts zeroed in on New York’s insistence on weighing whether a resident needs a permit to carry a gun. If “you’re looking for a permit to speak on a street corner,” there’s no need to demonstrate “your speech is particularly important,” he noted. Why the need to prove “that you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?”

That constitutional clarity appears to be lost on Hizzoner, who on Thursday was focused on ways to work around a ruling that could demolish the Sullivan Law’s strict permitting scheme. In a city that is reeling from a recent spike in violence and criminality — including a wave of shootings — this was a missed opportunity to engage with law-abiding New Yorkers who have long sought to be able to carry a firearm for self-defense.

Instead, Mr. Adams said that he was huddling with lawyers to find ways to blunt any ruling of the Supreme Court to give New Yorker’s access to their rights under the Second Amendment. “We are now looking with our legal experts to see what we can do,” Mr. Adams said, in respect of carrying handguns in public, “how we would curtail the behavior, [in] our transit system, around our schools.” Why presume gun owners are a menace to be curtailed?

Moreover, why not take a possible expansion of gun rights in New York as a step toward a broader community-based crime fighting effort? That’s not to say we’re endorsing vigilante justice. Yet there is an undeniable wisdom in the oft-cited observation by the head of the nation’s largest civil rights organization, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Admittedly, Mr. Adams is not alone in nursing concerns about allowing weapons in places like sports arenas or concert halls. He raised a fear of lawsuits “based on the areas you carved out.” Yet many jurisdictions have imposed such limits with a modicum of fuss. The Supreme Court justices suggested their ruling could allow tighter gun-carrying rules in “sensitive places” like, say, the subway, a courthouse, or even Times Square. 

Incidentally, Times Square is where Mr. Adams took his oath of office, swearing to “support the Constitution of the United States” — including the Second Amendment that the great jurist St. George Tucker called “the palladium of our liberties.” It would be a violation of that oath for Mr. Adams to defy the Supreme Court instead of embracing what could, for law-abiding, gun-owning New Yorkers, be seen as a “new birth of freedom.”

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This editorial was expanded from the bulldog edition.