I’d like to see your source. That’s hard for me to believe. I’ve watched a lot of interviews about Ronnie Van Zant & the band.
**** 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, and could be bought for as little as 20 dollars; a gun commonly known as a Saturday Night Special. As Ronnie stated in the song’s chorus: ‘Mister Saturday Night Special, got a barrel that’s blue and cold/Ain’t good for nothin’, but put a man six feet in the hole.’
The lead singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd was anti-gun, and kind of a lefty.
I’d like to see your source. That’s hard for me to believe. I’ve watched a lot of interviews about Ronnie Van Zant & the band.
**** 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, and could be bought for as little as 20 dollars; a gun commonly known as a Saturday Night Special. As Ronnie stated in the song’s chorus: ‘Mister Saturday Night Special, got a barrel that’s blue and cold/Ain’t good for nothin’, but put a man six feet in the hole.’
https://www.loudersound.com/amp/features/the-story-behind-saturday-night-special-by-lynyrd-skynyrd
My source was an interview with Ronnie himself, and is posted in this thread.
If you find it please share. If I do I’ll share. Thanks