Its message isn’t so much “We’re anti-gun” as it is “Don’t be like this guy who got drunk and shot a lot of people.”
Yes, it was, in his later years, one of Maurice Chevalier’s “signature” songs, and regarded as charming and rather humorous, not an endorsement of pedos and/or “dirty old men”. I don’t think it was regarded that way at all back in the day.
Actually it’s a little of both. Last verse goes:
Handguns are made for killing
They ain’t no good for nothing else
And if you like to drink your whiskey
You might even shoot yourself
So why don’t we dump 'em, people
To the bottom of the sea
Before some old fool come around here
And want to shoot either you or me
Get rid of the guns before some drunken idiot shoots you, is the message I hear.
Conway Twitty recorded a different song titled “Saturday Night Special”, in which a pawn broker sells a pistol to a man who is obviously going to use it to commit suicide (he asks the broker to “throw in one bullet”). Like the Skynyrd song, it’s not strictly anti-gun as much as critical of the heartlessness and greed of the pawn broker.
Including that you may be the drunken fool.
I’m not aware of any MAGAn who thinks that song is too “woke,” but then again I don’t hang around with that many of them. I think they can definitely identify with the tragedy and frustration of a loved one (or themselves) who let the liquor pull the trigger.
There’s a distinction between all handguns and Saturday Night specials, i.e., a type of cheap handgun predisposed to one-time, nefarious use. A person could be pro-gun while acknowledging that SNSs do more harm than good. The song does date from a less-polarized era when such nuanced positions were more common.
It sounds like the meaning may have changed between writing that lyric and writing the title. Or possibly, different people wrote them. Or even more likely: they were drunk.
In my hometown was a relic of the Guilded Age nicknamed The Castle. Reduced to a rooming house for women college students by the 1970s, it was included in Michael H. Kenyon’s sexual assault spree.
Kenyon did serve time for his offenses, but, finding mirth in the fact that he administered enemas to his victims, Frank Zappa composed a song in his honor.
Mirth aside, there is an FBI study available online where they interviewed the women who’d been in abusive relationships with the main focus of their study: violent offenders. Besides the sadistic beatings, enforced prostitution and bestiality, etc., a common feature was forced administration of enemas on the victims as anal intercourse eventually became the only form practiced. It’s mighty ugly reading.
If it’s not consensual there’s no humor to be found. How the Hell could it have ever been otherwise? Because women were raised so sexually repressed they really didn’t know they wanted it? Shit.