alt Hacker News> you should be aware of its whereabouts at any given moment
Says who? If the car is mine, I am free to do with it whatever I like (of course, excepting criminal acts). I do not owe anybody an account of what I - or the care - did at any particular moment. If the car was used in the commission of a crime, it's up to the prosecution to prove I had something to do with it. If they think I know who did it - prove it and prosecute me under the law. You can't just prosecute because you think I should know, that's not how proper law works - otherwise every cop in the country would be 100% sure who they caught is the criminal - because why not, if it's enough for conviction, why work harder!
> If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further?
They can question all they like, but to secure a criminal conviction, they must prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that I was the person who did it. Otherwise you get no conviction. If they strongly suspect I did it, they would find a proof - but the fact that I owned a gun is not that proof (for one, guns can be easily stolen, and frequently are).
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In Europe the law argues that cars are dangerous, and if you loan your car to a habitual bad driver, that's on you. You can either get the person who drove it to fess up, or the judge can fine you (because you lent out your car against better judgment) and impose a drivers log, so the circus doesn't happen again.
The arguing about having a constitutional right to drive bad boggles the mind, road deaths in the US are high, compared to civilized nations. Wikipedia states it's 14.2 deaths per 100000 inhbitants, that's between Sierra Leone (13.8) and Angola (15.0). For comparison, India has 12.6 traffic deaths per 100000 citizens and the worst country in Europe is Greece at 6.1.
The right metric is death per citizen, not per mile, because it's about the number of people who have lost a family member or friend.
When you get around exclusively on two wheels (motorcycle and bicycle) bad drivers are a direct safety threat. Even cagers ought to be careful about being permissive with red light running, side-on crashes are remarkably deadly for the one who got hit in the door because there is not much structural protection or space on the side of the vehicle.
But couldn't you then have the same argument for speeding tickets (or parking tickets)? Like, "I don't know who drove my car too fast or parked my car on the curb, so it's not my problem. The state should prove who did it.".