There are law-abiding gun owners. There are shooters. There is a constitutional amendment, for better or worse, that protects the fundamental right of a citizen to possess a gun. What’s a former police captain turned mayor to do?

In a solemn speech just three days after a police officer was killed in Manhattan, Mr. Adams called for immediate changes to add police officers to city streets to remove guns, and for help from the courts and state lawmakers in the months ahead.

“We will not surrender our city to the violent few,” Mr. Adams said.

Gun crimes have surged over the past year. Murders are still a fraction of what they were in the bad old crack epidemic days, but going up has its psychological impact and with reason. It seemed to be a problem solved. Obviously, it’s not, although few will admit that, and why it went down or is going up, is a mystery. Correlation does not imply causation, and no matter how strongly you believe that police strategies succeeded, it doesn’t explain the same phenomenon that happened elsewhere, places where those strategies weren’t employed. So it’s all cheap talk.

That leaves the new mayor with a problem, whether big or perceived to be big, and no real answers. But that doesn’t free him from the syllogisim, and to be fair, he asked to be mayor so now it’s his job to deal with whatever it is. Eric Adams came up with a plan.

Mr. Adams’s plan included the restoration of an anti-gun police unit, and called on state lawmakers to make a number of changes, including to New York’s bail law and to a law that altered how the state handles teenage defendants.

“I want to be clear: This is not just a plan for the future — it is a plan for right now,” the mayor said. “Gun violence is a public health crisis. There is no time to wait.”

If you thought gun violence was infrastructure, you were mistaken. The anti-gun unit, which used to be called the anti-crime unit, will have some cosmetic tweaks which will help somewhat to identify them as cops rather than robbers, assuming there’s a distinction, but will it prevent them from being the wild cowboys, constitutional rights be damned, they were before? There will be more training, but knowing proper protocol and doing it are not the same thing.

The plan for Neighborhood Safety Teams fulfills Mr. Adams’s campaign promise to reimagine the anti-crime units, whose primary role was finding illegal weapons. But it has also raised concern among community activists and civil rights lawyers that the city is returning to heavy-handed practices that led to the deaths of Amadou Diallo and Eric Garner, and which were often abused in ways that alienated communities of color.

Will we quietly return to the “stop & frisk” tactics of randomly tossing kids against walls? Of sealing off entire city blocks uptown and searching everyone on the street? If you never went above 125th Street or didn’t know anyone who did, you might be unaware of what a “vertical” is, where cops seized a building and tossed everyone they found in the hallways.

And then, there’s a nugget in the plan that’s revealing.

Mr. Adams called for harsher prosecution of young people charged with gun possession who were not willing to say where they had obtained the weapons, saying that such defendants should be tried as adults and potentially face stronger penalties.

This means 16-17-year-olds will be given the option of forfeiting their right to remain silent against their being brought to family court as children rather than criminal court as adults. And yes, this is still a self-incrimination issue, since you can’t say where you got a weapon without admitting that you possessed a weapon.

It’s understandable why Adams would want to do this, even if it falls a bit shy of honoring constitutional rights rather than using them as a law enforcement wedge to force kids to become snitches.

“We’re not looking to be heavy-handed, but we’re not looking to be dangerous to our city,” he told reporters after his speech. “And I’m going to find and strike that right balance.”

Easier said than done, because he still hasn’t come to grips with the biggest obstacle to getting guns off the streets of the city. Remember when Emily Bazelon wrote about black kids in Bed-Stuy prosecuted for guns they possessed to defend themselves from the bad dudes? No doubt some do, and no doubt others use it as an excuse. All gun possession is defensive until it’s not, when the kids start shooting for less-than-defensive reasons. The problem is that bad-dude shooters look the same as defensive possessors until the muzzle flash.

But until you commit a crime with a gun, kill with a gun, you’re just a person exercising his fundamental right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, this was the point of the amicus brief submitted by the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services in NYS Rifle & Pistol Assn v. Corlett, pending before the Supreme Court. How are Adams’ anti-gun cops, now with NYPD insignia somewhere on their plainclothes bods in their unmarked cars, going to know the difference between a guy exercising his Second Amendment rights from the bad dude who might shoot someone in the future?

On the other hand, the dreamers still dream.

[NYC Public Advocate and candidate for governor Jumaane] Williams, a Democrat like Mr. Adams and a candidate for governor, sought to offer a different path from the mayor that placed a priority on empowering communities through initiatives like investing in community-run recreational spaces and paying local residents to learn conflict-mediation skills.

“We can build safer, stronger communities without relying on strategies which in the past have inflicted lasting harm,” Mr. Williams said. “This is not a time to lose the lessons that we have learned.”

Adams is making this up on the fly because people are funny about feeling as if they don’t want to be killed today, rational risk assessment notwithstanding. But when the alternative option is riding prancing unicorns on rainbows, the effort to address fear of gun violence doesn’t seem nearly as extreme.

We had a couple years where there was exceptional public support for serious reform and hard truths about the costs reforms imposed. It’s a shame they were wasted on sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, because the new mayor is going to do something, and now we know the something he plans to do, the bad old days with a bit of gloss. The window for serious reform was only going to stay open for so long, and Mayor Eric Adams just announced that he’s slamming it shut.