MIXED martial arts is one of the fastest-growing sports in America. Yet for years the New York State Legislature has refused to sanction M.M.A. — making New York one of the last states holding out against the sport’s expansion. (Connecticut is a holdout, too.) After helping to block a clause in last year’s budget that would have legalized M.M.A., Bob Reilly, a state assemblyman, called it “a violent sport not worthy of our society.”

As the editor in chief of Men’s Health, I’d been a de facto supporter of New York’s ban by refusing to put a mixed-martial artist on the magazine’s cover — despite the entreaties of several editors and even my own brother, Eric, who trained in M.M.A. I edit a health magazine, after all, and this is a sport in which men use nearly every means available to beat one another into submission, from jujitsu to kickboxing to simply slugging one another in the face with nothing but lightly padded gloves on their hands.

But I’ve come to believe that, in fact, the New York Legislature is wrong. Mr. Reilly is wrong. And more to the point, I was wrong (an admission my brother will hold over my head as long as I live). Mixed martial arts may be a violent sport, but it is much safer than other, supposedly more civilized competitions, and New York and its fellow holdouts should finally sanction it.

We think of more traditional violent sports like boxing and football as safer in part because of the helmets and padded gloves their athletes wear, and that supposedly protect them from harm. These are, in fact, more like the equivalent of poorly designed sunscreen — “protection” that allows athletes to submit to even greater levels of punishment.