A carnival game that offered fair-goers the chance to win prizes by shooting a black man has been axed after complaints that the target resembled President Obama.

"I voted for the man. It wasn't meant to be him," Irvin Good Jr, the president of Goodtime Amusements, which ran the attraction, told the Morning Call newspaper. "If they took it that way, we apologise."

The fairground shooting gallery, named "Alien Invasion", appeared at the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Big Time Fair in Roseto, Pennsylvania, last month, and attracted complaints for using using a lifesize figure of a black man in a suit, wearing a belt buckle labelled "The Prez" and clutching a rolled-up sheaf of papers marked "Health Bill".



While Irvin Good said "I guess we made an error in judgment and we apologise for that," other fair-goers were not so sure.

In a letter to the editor of the LeHigh Valley Express-Times, a family attending a reunion at the carnival wrote: "We were appalled to find that a shooting game had as its target an unmistakable image of President Obama. One wins a prize by shooting the president on targets placed on his head or heart. Adults and children alike were taking aim at the president."

The family said it challenged the game's owner, who claimed it was "freedom of speech".

One member of the family, Kathryn Chapman, spoke to the Express-Times. "I was totally floored, just appalled," she said. "I just can't believe how far things have come that now on church property you can shoot the president and get a prize if you hit him in the head or heart."