I had a long reply planned, but I'll keep it short. A buddy of mine from college used to drive like you do.....didn't get to finish college....his plans were interrupted by the five years spent in prison after he lost control and killed two people.
Ouch. Sounds like he lost control. Was racing the reason? On one hand you have random circumstance which i cant account for, or you have driver error, which ive certainly had my fair share of while NOT racing (because i try to turn sometimes when not street racing, which is more dangerous), but assuming standard 'college age' ive already got 2-3X the duration of not hurting anyone while street racing or doing anything else, which doesnt account for the possible difference between someone like me who drives at least 55 mi/day (used to be more), and the statistical 95% of the population who has less car experience per given time unit because they simply dont drive that much (or that many different things.. ive owned ~50 cars and drive other people's various cars all day as a tech). I'll admit that given the role of random circumstance, i've been 'lucky' to make all my mistakes in a way that allowed me to learn from them instead of dissuading me from any further learning.
We wouldn't run if there was traffic. Basic safety 101. Why didn't we go to a track? The closest decent one was either in Houston or Dallas/Ft. Worth. It was all mainly 1/4 mile stuff. Some of the crazy shiny happy people would get up on 183 and do a 60+ MPH blast with their single turbo Supras & RX7s. That was crazy.
Given the difficulty of finding really controllable situations on surface streets unless there are NO cross streets or entrances or two-way traffic, i still think it's way safer to race from a fast roll on a highway than it is to race from a stop on a surface street. Especially given that the chance of tire spin is about 50X greater at speeds under 60, and people don't just pop out perpendicular to your direction on a highway. Just my .02.
I really miss it ... some of my best car memories are from the street meets.
my days at the track never matched it.
Shoosh, you are undermining the accepted enthusiast party line of 'take it to a for-profit institution' with your insinuations of less fun! 
Is it more likely that somebody will get shot with a gun if the person handling the gun is behaving in an irresponsible manner? berkeley yes it is.
Where is irresponsible coming from? It's a damn gun. Talking about gun safety as if it's possible to get it down to 'safer than no gun' is just bullE36 M3 we tell ourselves to justify our 'irresponsible' behavior. Sort of like how it is ok, even in the eyes of the law, to drink SOME alcohol and still drive around as if there is absolutely no measurable effect on your ability (teetotaller here, but i usually dont pick on drinkers as it's unwise to start a fight with 80+% of the self-deluding population).
But let's just say that you have two guys shooting guns for fun, each in the middle of nowhere, far away from each other, and they decide they want to have a competition. So they go to a gun range. Is it somehow LESS dangerous that these guys are in range of each other (regardless of their intention of not shooting AT each other) because they are at a naysayer-approved location (a gun track, if you will)? Nope. Still more dangerous in spite of it's 'legitimacy' as an outlet. This is because it's being compared to a hypothetical situation that doesnt actually exist. False Dichotomy. Anything is more dangerous than a fake, impossible made up situation where there is assumed to be no possible way for things to go wrong, which is basically how people view all driving BUT street racing whenever they are choosing to single out street racing for admonishment. If people took the same approach to viewing track time as they did to street racing, they would declare it irresponsible as well. That's the problem i was describing in my first post with my comment about an unspecified constant of safety that all non-racing magically adheres to (for the purposes of denouncing street racing).
Im not going to make up fake situations to compare my street racing to. I already have the other 99.9% of my ~14 years behind the wheel to go off of. In my experience, given the right set of prerequisites (mine CLEARLY preclude participating in most of the street racing that is being demonized in this thread), the racing i do is often safer than my normal commute, and when it isn't, it's hardly any worse than the type of speeding i do even when im not racing. Giving a no-tolerance treatment to street racing is just choosing to see a world of greys in black and white. You can say that certain combinations of circumstances are unsafe, and i will PROBABLY agree with you, but once you start trying to lump everything together under a catch-all term that demonizes others, im pretty much out.
