Its like both of yous two said, its how you go about showing the kids the sport. if you educate them on it and the beauty, and perhaps see if they want to learn some techniques like boxing, kickboxing, jj, etc. then cool. you teach them that it should only be done when they are training or have a fight. a ton of people are not informed about the sport and the vast majority are people who have tv shows or are writers for papers. people read or see those and then take on those views without even learning about the sport. I try to be open minded to things, and thankfully I was able to see mma for myself and form my own opinion instead of having mine formed by the paper or tv, which portray it as human cock fighting and barbaric. uh no peoples, boxing is more like that.

German politicans haven’t been known to be the wisest in the world

I do however get what you’re saying about the kids thing, I also believe that “taking them” to an event is different than seeing it on the bigscreen… If I was teaching my child the martial arts that I know or had them enrolled in BJJ or otherwise, then perhaps ya I can see letting them watch our sport… I don’t think that our sport is overly violent what so ever,yet alot of teenies get the wrong idea watching MMA (Dr. Phil thingy right)…… I don’t want to get into personals here, yet I do want to state that MMA isn’t too violent for a child to watch if like “one of us” could sit with them and inform them (someone educated in MMA) and explain to them this beautiful sport… Rather than have some simple minded drunkard who wanted to see some people get beatup tell their child that its cool and easy to do….. We know that MMA isn’t as violent as boxing persay or hell even WWF who has had more deaths in the last 20yrs than I believe MMA has (don’t quote me could be wrong, but I remember the Erickson brothers, Owen Hart, Eddie Gurrero…..) so I’m not sure the visual violence is what I would be protecting against but more of the ignorance factor….. As far as taking a child to a live event well it just isn’t the smartest idea imo, the lanuage, fights in the crowds, spilling beer on a child would make me go crazy, etc….. I’m not against educating a child about MMA but more apt to protect them from certain aspects of MMA crowds…..

1. It’s Reilly in NY. O’Reilly is the TV talk show host.
2. The ignorance to the sport is ridiculous, I’m rather surprised that the UFC didn’t do more research on the country’s feelings towards MMA before going there, in the end I think a successful UFC event in the country will go a long way to turn around their opinion. It’s also interesting to see that German politicians are just as stupid and ill informed as American ones.

3. I understand why some people make the argument towards not letting kids see MMA. I disagree with that though for a number of reasons. (Not trying to step on any toes… but that could happen.) I was eight when the first UFC took place, and I saw it then, and was sold on the sport. We let kids train in martial arts, including MMA, why not let them watch them? There is fighting in Hockey, are we going to tell kids they can’t watch hockey? Can we not let kids watch boxing either? What about Wrestling Entertainment, and violent children’s TV shows? I watched WWE and WCW as a kid, and it took until I was closing in on my teenage years to recognize that it was “fake”, and they have people hitting each other with chairs and bats and jumping off ladders, and all sorts of shenanigans. In regards to violent children’s TV shows, I spent my years from 5-10(ish) watching Power Rangers, where they killed a bad guy every episode. I was smart enough to recognize that as fake, but I knew people who did not. I think that it is the job of parents to parent their kids, not the government, so it should be a parent’s decision what their kids can and can’t watch. Accordingly, if a parent allows their child to watch MMA, they have a responsibility to explain to them that those guys are adults and are trained to do that. Just like if you take your kid to watch skydivers, you’re going to explain to them that the skydivers are adults that are trained to do that so that your kid doesn’t try to jump out the emergency exit the next time you fly cross country, or the same way that you would teach a child about guns if you had just let them watch a tv show/movie with gun violence.

As an Italian I would love the historical irony if Italy has the same issues.