Luv:
I also agree that if you lend your car to someone who is irresponsible and speeds 50 over and your car is impounded then yeah, maybe you should be more careful about who you lend your vehicle to? For that matter, you are not responsible for their actions, you are responsible for your actions. In the example you cited, your actions would be to lend your vehicle to someone who blatantly disobeys the law. The key word here is blatantly. If they just did 20 over? No harm no foul, the driver gets the ticket and the owner is not involved.
To use your gun owner example: if the owner of a handgun lends his gun to a criminal and that criminal shoots a police officer, yes, I feel the gun owner should have some responsibility for the actions taken by the person he provided the weapon to. I say this because if the criminal was legally allowed to own a gun, he would. The gun owner is circumventing the systems put in place to semi-control who gets to own a handgun.
As for the Name they applied to the law. Get over it. Seriously. Who really gives a rat's ass whether they were racing someone else or just doing a speed trial on their vehicle? The effects are the same.
I don't know about you but I was never told that this new (old now) law was brought in to only curb street racing. Yes, the emphasis was on the increase in racing related deaths but if you read any of the news reports you'd have known that it wasn't just racers that they were going after.
Why is it that some people just can't grasp the concept that laws are put into place to stop a certain illegal activity? I mean get over it already. If they brought in a law that states it's illegal to kill someone and they called it "the rubber baby buggy bumper" law WHO THE F CARES????
As for your 1/2% stat (which remains to be proven), what are the stats for speed related deaths? I bet they are a heck of a lot higher than 1/2%. In fact, I think I read somewhere that 60% of highway deaths were directly related to the speed of the vehicles. I would also hazard a guess that speeding not only contributes to highway deaths, but to non-fatal accidents as well. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the faster an object travels, the more energy is released when it meets another object.
I mean really dude, what's your problem? A law was brought into effect that should help stop or at least punish people who CHOOSE to speed excessively. What it's called, why they brought it in, who is getting penalized, if irrelevant!
As long as this law penalizes people who break the law, then I'm behind it 100%.