@Lollardfish I kept saying, “Show a gun. Show a gun. Show a gun.” Then I was mad they wussed out.Nationwide wants us to be afraid of the wrong things.
— Jess Banks (@ProfBanks) February 2, 2015
This tweet was in reference to the nasty Nationwide ad that showed cute kids saying they never got to do things, with the kicker, "because I died." Then they showed an overflowing bathtub, an open cabinet under the sink, and a crashed flatscreen TV.
What they didn't show, was a gun. Of course, they don't want to offend the gun lobby. But what they also didn't show the #1 danger to children in America. Read down to find out what it is. Do you know?
Here's the commercial.
According to the Children's Defense Fund report, a child or teen is injured by a gun every 30 minutes. Seven are killed every day. And this number is apparently often under reported.
Now falling TVs do send a child to the ER every 30 minutes, but only 215 died from 2000-2011. A relatively tiny number.
There are about 20,000 accidental child-poisoning-related calls every year, but the "most serious" ones all involve adults.
So firearms are definitely an issue, but it turns out that most of the 0-19 year old deaths from firearms are homicides. Here's the whole data on unintentional injury from the National MCH Center for Child Death Review:
- In 2010, there were 83,267,556 children aged 0-19, of which 45,091 died.
- 8,684 died from unintentional injury. 1027 from drowning, 365 from fires, 1,176 from suffocation and strangulation, and 134 from firearms.
- 4,419 from motor vehicles.
So let's get real. Not only could Nationwide have shown us a gun, but if they really wanted to show us what kills children - all we have to do is look to all those lovely cars featured in about 50% of the Superbowl ads throughout the night.
UPDATE:
From twitter user @cl0r0x70 I got this chart (source):
UPDATE:
From twitter user @cl0r0x70 I got this chart (source):
