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Tuesday, September 24, 2002 - 11:44 am  It is common knowledge among the gun advocates that the term "Saturday Night Special" for cheaply made, concealable handguns originates from the racist "Niggertown Saturday Night". The problem is that this "common knowledge" rests on a slender reed and is challenged by other sources, less interested in vilifying the pro-control forces. The source of the NRA's "gospel is B. Bruce-Briggs' article, "The Great American Gun War" in The Public Interest, no 45 (Fall 1976). B-B offers the following "evidence":
With no source for the claim, B-B's evidence is nothing but air. It's hardly "evidence" at all, little less sufficient. Nonetheless, David Kopel takes the claim and runs with it. To give B-B's rather flimsy assertion some weight, Kopel (in "All the Way Down the Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties in America", i{22 Hamline L. Rev. 399} also cites Kelley v. R.G. Industries, Inc., 497 A.2d 1143 (Md. 1985). WEhich is bizarre, because footnote 8 gives a different origin:
They attribute the phrase to the tesimony of a Detroit POlice Officer before Congress in 1972 -- 13 years before B-B came up with his creative source. According to John Ciardi, poet and word maven, in A Bowsers Dictionary (1980) the term was derived from "Saturday Night Rush Hour" -- an expression used by Detroit emergency room personnel to refer to the rash of shooting victims that occured with dispiriting regularity on Saturday nights. But that version doesn't serve the needs of the gun lobby, does it?
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