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.
*** 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...