Nationwide wants us to be afraid of the wrong things.

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 did\’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):