"Look Daddy, that man's head is missing!"

I was sitting on my couch, which I very rarely do, watching the Oilers-Islanders game when all of sudden, right in the middle of a HOCKEY game, a fight broke out. It was like most fights, a big ol' hug with slappy man punches to the back of the opponent followed by the requisite tackle. Pro-fight advocates always make two points: Hardly anyone ever gets hurt in a fight and nobody leaves their seat during a fight. Even my girlfriend stopped what she was doing to watch from across the room. I'm in the middle of the fight debate. Refs don't catch everything, which leaves room for an argument that there's a necessity for vigilantism to act as a second-tier governance. Yet no other sport tolerates fighting, not even football, the most violent, so why does hockey need the threat of in-game violence to govern itself when others can do without it? I'm not settling anything here, not today anyways, but I just wanted to quickly refute the above two pro-fight arguments. Players constantly get hurt in fights but the injury seems to happen more in the post-fight tackle than the fight itself. While injuries from punches thrown may occur less frequently than other types of in-game injuries, there's a pretty long list of players who suffered career-ending concussions during fights. Perhaps less overall injuries, but when they do they are severe. The second one is easy. Fans in Vancouver didn't leave their seats when Todd Bertuzzi punched out Steve Moore. Perhaps there should be more of that?