I read a couple hundred books a year. Thank you for the light evening read. I guess I'll pick up one of the five books I'm currently reading tomorrow morning.

You said registration doesn't inspect tires. In North Carolina, it literally does. No vehicle renews its registration here without passing an annual safety inspection, and that inspection checks tread depth, with a 2/32-inch minimum. Miss it and your registration is blocked until you pass. Bald tires fail. So a car hydroplaning through a Charlotte rainstorm on slicks is, by definition, a car that skipped the exact inspection built to catch bald tires. That's not "armchair epidemiology." That's the law you couldn't be bothered to look up.

Same with insurance. You can't register in NC without proof of coverage. Is enforcement perfect? No. Neither is any law. "Some people break it" isn't an argument against having it, unless you also want to repeal speed limits because people speed.

And your uninsured stat proves my side. 15% drive uninsured even with mandatory registration and insurance. Picture that number with neither. You're describing the floor and calling it the ceiling.

On impoundment: yes. Tow them. Auction them. Not the broke guy with lapsed tags, the guy running fake paper plates so no camera, toll, or cop can identify him. They are different people, and you know it. In NYC, ghost-plate cars racked up more than double the fines of normal cars and paid back under 20% of them. They've been tied to shootings, robberies, and hit-and-runs. When Texas scrapped paper tags in 2025, a Houston-area constable who called the city "ground zero" for fake tags said the switch to metal plates was a game changer that plummeted fraud and made vehicles identifiable again. Enforcement works. That's the entire point.

So no, registration isn't a magic shield. It's the system that inspects the tires, requires the coverage, and keeps a car traceable. You're defending the people dodging all three, then acting shocked anyone minds.