It is televised and broadcasted more frequently. What sports do is allow a child to learn how to properly cope with the stresses of life and help them to control their method of venting. Stress usually leads to frustration and frustration leads to violence. These items are commonly found within our sports structure. We just show youth how to control their emotions with them.
Hockey has a good reputation for being rough.
We do need to enforce punishments within the league for fighting, but to use the government as a source of jurisdiction only needs to happen in rare extreme circumstances. Politically if we were to support this people would applaud at the attempt to curb violence, but at that same time they would be concerned about the lack of large-scale vision that is needed for our leaders. We need to focus on violence as a whole. If we were to attack hockey, it would be like attacking pipe production companies to stop tobacco companies from producing tobacco. We will see that society is ok with the little violence that is within hockey, what they are not ok with is the extreme cases that cause large bodily and physical harm.