Wealth & Money Quote by Alva Myrdal

The power here is in the feigned innocence. Myrdal isn’t really asking where the guns and grenades “come from”; she’s staging a moral cross-examination of the systems that pretend violence is an accident. The first question points outward, toward the object itself, then swivels to the real target: permission. Not the criminal’s choice, but the state’s licensing of supply.

Her pairing is deliberate and politically loaded. “Saturday night specials” invokes cheap, easily concealed handguns associated with street crime and panic politics; “hand grenades” jump the frame to terrorism and national security. By yoking the two, she collapses the usual bureaucratic distinctions that let governments treat domestic gun harm as a cultural inevitability while treating terrorism as an exceptional emergency. The subtext: the pipeline is the same, and so is the abdication.

As a diplomat and arms-control advocate in a Cold War era saturated with weapons flows, Myrdal knew that violence has procurement chains, export paperwork, and profit motives. The phrase “instrument of threats” is tellingly clinical: these weapons are not symbols of freedom or identity; they are tools designed to coerce. Her closing question - “How can... be permitted?” - isn’t a request for policy detail. It’s a shaming device, forcing the listener to confront complicity: if the state can regulate imports, sales, and borders, then unregulated weapon circulation is not helplessness. It’s a choice dressed up as inevitability.