Issues with accessing properties in c#

I'm trying to implement an item system, And I want to change the values of certain variables in a bunch of scripts depending on the weapon the player has equipped.

I have a class, "Weapon", with properties of MaxDamage,AttackSpeed, and Range. (This class inherits from an Item class I made)

In another script, "PlayerCharacter", I have a property called EquipedWeapon, of type Weapon. Right now, since I don't have the equipment system set up yet, i just assisgned the variable EquipedWeapon references as a new Weapon(); using the default constructor.

In my attack script for the player, I'm trying to set the maxDamage in that script to the MaxDamage of the EquipedWeapon property, but I can't seem to get it to work properly.. I'm getting the Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Does anyone know what's wrong?

Heres the code:

Assigning the equippedWeapon public class PlayerCharacter : MonoBehaviour {

     public Weapon equipedWeapon;
     
     private Weapon EquipedWeapon{
         get { return equipedWeapon; }
         set { equipedWeapon = value; }
     }
     
     // Use this for initialization
     void Start () {
         equipedWeapon = new Weapon();
     }

And heres the attack script, Trying to reference the properties of the EquipedWeapon property:

 public void adjustVars() {
             PlayerCharacter pc = (PlayerCharacter)GetComponent("PlayerCharacter");
     
             maxDamage = pc.EquipedWeapon.MaxDamage;
             attackSpeed = pc.EquipedWeapon.AttackSpeed;
             range = pc.EquipedWeapon.Range;
         }

Does this make sense? Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

-Thanks