Soil Surgeon
Forum Supporter
A question I often hear is someone asking "is it legal." The thing is that here in the US, everything is legal, unless it is illegal. But for some reason our mindset is that we are constantly looking for someone to give us permission to do things that are legal. The problem with metal detecting is that there are so many activities involved in it that can be deemed illegal, like digging, defacing, removing, those are the things that are getting us. But I think the first step is to get that mindset out of our heads that we can't do anything without permission. If there is not a law against what we are doing, then we can do it. Simple as that. A warning is always preferable to a citation, and those who write citations can be pretty creative in getting their point across, but I seldom just accept that I am wrong just because someone else doesn't like what I'm doing.
The second part of this is policy. Policy is not law, but it helps define the law, and it sets precedence. If I am in doubt about something, like a park, I don't ask for permission, I ask what is the policy on metal detecting. I often get a different reaction to that question, because it is not a yes/no question. Someone has to actually address it. I ran across this when I first started detecting. I asked the fellow who is in charge of park maintenance what their policy was. He told me that the policy is that the ground has to be returned to its original condition. That's exactly what we do. Sounds like a policy that is made for us. But actually it is addressing other issues, like fastening soccer goals to the ground, putting up tents, things like that. We often get caught up in the no digging no defacing wording, but we aren't the only ones who dig. If I had just asked him if I could go out there and metal detect and dig stuff up, it would have been much easier for him to say no. But the policy defines what constitutes illegal. In our parks, it is illegal to dig, but the policy infers that making a hole and filling it back up is not digging.
Very good ! So good in fact that Tom in CA may let you hunt " his" turf without the customary 30% of finds surcharge .