Dave Rishar
Silver Member
So I was reading old banner finds, and saw a coin spill in England and the finder said he was going to turn the coins in instead of keeping them. I wanted to ask how and why do folks in certain different countries turn in the Coins they find? Then what's the point of detecting? Like are the feds going to search your house if you keep them?
It's not a violation of integrity, the government already has plenty of resources and could care less for an individual or their way of life. The way I see it if it was found on yours or someone else's property it belongs to you, how on God's green earth does it belong to the government? Because they say so?
As has already been mentioned, in some countries anything recovered belongs to the government. I'm not an expert on how the UK handles things, but it seems good in theory. It may be terrible in practice, but I like the idea in concept.
I feel so blessed that I live in America and not under quite such a tyrannical government, where we're freer than most......
And that freedom stops abruptly when you want to MD in an area where it's prohibited for historical reasons. The main complaint that I see regarding MDing in historical areas is that there's a concern that provenance will be lost when filthy metal dectorists like us go in and just dig stuff up, but imagine if there was a system that allowed us to go into areas where we're not currently allowed to go. We'd be required to document what we found and where we found it. The government would have the option of purchasing what we'd found, and if they chose not to purchase, we'd be free to do with it what we like.
There would be a lot of odds and ends to hammer out for this to work, and I don't have all of the answers here. We would need to get multiple communities together to make this feasible. But again, imagine if you were able to detect all of those spots that you can not detect legally, legally, even if you had to jump through some hoops. It would potentially be better than the system that we have now. Implemented properly, you'd be able to go into that DNR land that you're currently barred from, and if the government wanted what you'd found, you'd get a fair price for it.
Is that conceptually more or less free than what the citizens of the UK have to deal with when metal detecting?