News/Current Events HUMOR Source: The Washington Past Published: Monday, February 21, 2000 Author: Boob Woodward Posted on 02/20/2000 20:15:33 PST by kristinn
President Clinton this morning will announce a total recall by the U.S. Mint of 400 million 25 cent pieces which feature an armed man on its reverse side.
The quarter was released earlier this year as part of a 10-year program of commemorating each state's entry into the Union with a specially designed reverse side denoting its date of entry and featuring designs approved by each state and the Mint.
Last year, five quarters were released without controversy. However, the first quarter in this year's batch, which honors Massachusetts, has drawn outrage from children's groups, gun control advocates and others.
The reverse of the Massachusetts quarter features an engraving of the state with a Minuteman holding a flintlock rifle embossed over it.
Sarah Brady, outgoing president of Hand Gun Control, Inc., said she was "livid" and "nearly had a stroke" the first time she saw the gun-toting man on the quarter. She said she felt betrayed by the Clinton administration, which recently renamed the White House press briefing room in honor of her husband James Brady, who was grievously wounded by gunfire in an assassination attempt on President Reagan. Brady added that the quarter brought back "horrible memories" of that day.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) who was promoted to the Senate two years ago from the House in part for his staunch gun-control advocacy, said he first saw the offensive quarter when he was playing "quarters" with Sen. Kennedy (D-Mass.) at a Capitol Hill watering hole.
Schumer says he was draining a pint of Rolling Rock after Kennedy had bounced a quarter into it and reacted in "horror" when he saw a man with a gun pointed at him through the bottom of the glass, causing him to drop it and dive under the table.
Kennedy joined him under the table, thinking Schumer had a waitress down there. Instead of a hotty, he found the quarter which frightened his colleague. Shumer says they both said at the same time, "That quarter is dangerous !"
Marianne Wright Edelman, head of the Children's Defense Fund says she is "upset" and "scared for the children" who will see the "bad man with a gun" on the quarter and get the message that "guns are cool." She says the quarter will undermine years of efforts to teach children that guns are dangerous and should only be owned by the government.
A chagrined President Clinton, responding quickly to head off an election-year snafu that could hurt his fellow Democrats, ordered every Massachusetts quarter taken out of circulation and destroyed. A design to replace the gun-toting militia man has not been chosen yet.