Posted on 06/22/2024 9:46:34 AM PDT by DoodleBob
In art, as in life, some things are not always what they seem. So it is with the song that gave Lynyrd Skynyrd a US Top 30 hit in 1975.
The song in question has always been perceived as an anti-gun protest song. Actually it’s more complicated, more nuanced than that.
Saturday Night Special was a protest song with a caveat. In the words written and sung by Ronnie Van Zant, the leading figure in the band’s first great era, there was a question that went to the heart of America’s gun culture: ‘Why don’t we dump ’em, people, to the bottom of the sea?’ But the truth was that Ronnie Van Zant was no anti-gun campaigner.
On the contrary, at the time when he wrote the song he owned a .22 calibre pistol. He used it when hunting for rabbits and squirrels in the woods around the band’s home town of Jacksonville, Florida. What Ronnie was advocating in the song was greater control of illegal handguns – specifically a type of gun that was freely available on the black market in 1970s America, …a Saturday Night Special…
…
‘It was a strong message that Ronnie was conveying,” Rossington says. “Those cheap handguns were no good for hunting or anything else – they were just made to kill people. And those guns were easy to find. We came from a rough part of town, the west side of Jacksonville. There were a lot of bad people there, and every week you’d hear that somebody got shot or killed.”
…
“Every time I sing Saturday Night Special,” Johnny (Van Zant) adds, “I feel the power in those words that Ronnie wrote. There are too many guns in America. My brother knew what he was talking about.”
(Excerpt) Read more at loudersound.com ...
Otoh, most of them didn't blown up,(ie: hi-point, cheap and not know to blow up) they just misfired, fired when you least expected it, or broke. Hence the invention of electrical tape handles with chunk's of wood.
They could prevent someone from killing you.
Most encounters involving a firearm end with one party showing a firearm and an aggressor backing off.
I work in a gun shop and every now and then someone brings in a Rohm or Lorcin or Jennings or some other POS and asks if we want to buy it. We break the bad news to them that it’s more useful as a rock than a gun and warn against shooting it.
No, its anti-Linda Lou.
“Sweet Home Alabama” was meant to ridicule the state, but that’s not how things turned out.
My first thought
Gimme back my bullets
Put ‘em back where they belong
Ain’t foolin’ around ‘cause I’ve done had my fun
Ain’t gonna see no more damage done
Gimme back my bullets
That sounds so anti gun lol 😏
In the 1960s you could get a legal Saturday Night Special for $12. In the 1900s a San Francisco news paper gave them away to people who subscribed to their newspaper.
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/free-pistol-san-francisco-newspaper-subscription-1887/
In the 1960s the main target was 5 shot army surplus rifles. Here is how it was...
Here are the democrat promises beginning in 1962...
Starting in 1962 with the demand of Dems Thomas J. Dodd and Emanuel Cellar...
1962 We ONLY want to register handguns. Rifles will not be affected!
1964, We ONLY want to register ALL firearms, not ban them.
1968 We ONLY want to register all guns, and ban the import of foreign Saturday Night Specials, and 5-shot bolt action army surplus rifles! (they got the ban).
1970, We ONLY want to ban small American handguns. Rifles will not be affected!
In 1976, the founder of handgun Control Inc told in a New Yorker interview his goal was to make ownership of all handguns “TOTALLY ILLEGAL”.
1976 We ONLY want to ban ALL handguns! Rifles will not be affected!
1981, Actress Lee Grant on Good Morning America screams and pokes holes in the air with her finger...”THE NRA IS A RIFLE ORGANIZATION! THEY SHOULD GIVE UP THEIR HANDGUNS AND THEY CAN KEEP THEIR RIFLES!”
1984, They came for the rifles.
1994, they got an “A-s-s-ault Rifle ban hoping it would be forever. Instead of turning off the lights and going home they immediately found another target to attack, 50 Cal Rifles “That can bring down an AIRCRAFT!”
Back in 1970, the Denver Post had an anti-gun article about those “E-e-vil” Saturday Night Specials. They declared any handgun that sold for $45 or less was an SNS and needed to be banned. The pistol shown was a Ruger Mk II.
You could buy a brand new in the box Winchester 1894 for that price.
Gun owners know they are always up against a stacked deck.
Regardless of its origins, the term “Saturday Night Special” was used disapprovingly for decades in the South by law enforcement to refer to inexpensive, small caliber handguns used to settle close-quarter disputes in low-income neighborhoods - often involving alcohol, often on the evening of the last day of the workweek.
The term referred to the guns but more broadly was juxtaposing the people and culture surrounding the guns; in other words, black-on-black violence.
Don't know if Lynyrd Skynyrd was developmental enough to understand the context. Being from Jacksonville, they should have been.
“Daddy would have gotten us UZIS!”
Only ones I have heard of blowing up was when some idiot put a modern high pressure cartridge in an antique made in the 1870s, or modern gun powder in a muzzle loading rifle or revolver.
An old Dr. Demento favorite: Everybody Run, the Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG3yGdQYwqg
*** in other words, black-on-black violence.***
Lots of country and Western music dealt with cheap guns.
I remember one by Waylon Jennings about an adulterous wife and he says “I slipped into a pawn shop and bought a little twenty two...”
And another comic song about a pair of binoculars that the singer is looking at in a pawn shop.. He tells what all he sees over town with them till he sees his neighbor slip into his home where his wife is...
“And as they pulled the shades down one by one,
I put the binoculars down and I bought me a gun...
The message was "unless you have enough money to buy a handgun of a certain quality you have no right to buy something cheap to defend yourself".
It is the same classism that is behind all gun control. Only people of certain economic standing should be able to be armed.
Funny, but I do not find that in the Second Amendment.
Typical antigun bullsqueeze “nuanced” my aunt fanny
Not according to Fox news, which is now writing him off, ever so subtly...
Cedartown, Georgia.
I like the bass line.
In terms of storyline, Waylon took it a little too far.
Who cares?
A cheap gun is EXACTLY the type that would be bought by a poor person as a “just in case” gun. It is cheap enough to buy on impulse and keep in your nightstand drawer.
Similarly, the tirades against “assault weapons” got started when lots of surplus Chinese SKS rifles became available for about $90 back in the early 1980s. They were the kind a regular person would buy on impulse and stick in the closet “just in case”.
This alarmed the people who prefer a disarmed population.
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