…but they definitely aren’t street racers.
We've said this so many times before, but today we have an example for the purely selfish of why you shouldn't partake in dangerous driving on public roads. More than 80 people were arrested just a couple of days ago for what the police called "street racing." If you have been following the events that police have been trying to address recently; then you'll know that this is a growing trend on public roads. It could be due to the closing down of local race tracks, increasing anger against police, or a general drop in IQ among people who claim to be car enthusiasts without actually respecting any faucet of the car community. Our society has taken a dangerous route to a place that no car enthusiast wants to call home.
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Gwinnett County, Georgia, has recently seen the arrest of 68 adults and 20 minors on the basis of illegal "street racing." You may be confused about why we keep referring to the term in quotes; that's simply because these people are not racing. Real street racing itself is not particularly dangerous in most applications. Typically, you might have a 40-roll on an abandoned road at night, a race from a stoplight, or just quick pulls on the highway resulting in little to no harm for any party involved. Instead, this was known as a takeover in which drivers block off an intersection and do burnouts until the cops come.
Drifting came about to show skillful control over your car on a mountain road or dedicated track. However, it has become little more than a joke to these people who think they own the streets. Rather than getting better at driving in performance settings or competing with fellow racers, all they want to do is cause chaos. This is well represented by one pizza delivery driver who had no part in the takeover but had his windows smashed in for trying to get away. These are not car people. All they are is a bunch of criminals and kids trying to impress each other by doing the easiest thing you can do in a powerful car, spin the tires.
This gives the car community a terrible reputation, and it also sets a bad example for all of those young car people who want to express their passion for all things automotive. Other sites have focused on the immediate repercussions of these acts and, for some reason, focused on the fact that the police confiscated five handguns. But this is America, and you're allowed to have a gun, so it doesn't matter that they were armed outside of possible violation of ownership regulations. Nobody got shot; there was no shoot-out. All that happened was that officers from all over the county, including some off-duty, managed to stop about 26 cars in their tracks. It's great to see that the cops are doing something about it, but we need to speak up as car people and let these hooligans know that they don't look cool trashing their hellcats and hitting each other with cars. Its time we bring back the age-old adage "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
