Borninok, you say: "The Western half of the U.S. is more lenient with regards to metal detecting" On the contrary. I would say it may be more equal than you think. You must be thinking that if we show up at city halls here, that we would get more "yes's", than you east coast guys do? I don't think that's the case. I bet I would get a lot of "no's. (afterall, their image is geeks with shovels leaving messes)
I have been booted from a few parks, but I just take that to mean "just that one park", or "just avoid that one gardener", etc..."
Put it this way: let's say you go to a neighboring town in your state, to detect with a new fellow you just met. You guys agree to meet up at a certain park for that day's hunt. You ask your new friend "do you have permission to detect here?" And he says "gee, I never even thought about that. I mean, we've detected here for years, and it never occured to us we needed to ask. But don't worry, no one's ever said anything, and the gardener just gives us a friendly wave each day". So do you think "but that's not permission and I better go down to city hall just in casethere might be a law that my friend doesn't know about"?
You bring up an isolated stretch of federal beach in CA, where, yes, I too heard that they boot people. But the odd thing is, a few years back a fellow came on a CA forum saying he'd found a good beach, and was harvesting hundreds of coins, and some jewelry, as fast as he could dig. It was a long drive for him, and he just couldn't believe that the locales hadn't discovered this, and/or weren't working it. Naturally, he didn't divulge the name of the beach, because this had become his "secret spot". He went for several months, any day he chose, even crowded weekends etc.... One day, I got his confidence up, and he confided in me which beach it was: Stinson! Yup, the "illegal" beach. I told him "I thought that beach was off-limits?" He says "HUH? what do you mean?" Turns out he had no idea! Funny thing was, he was certain he had been detecting right in front of rangers (innocently not knowing there was anything amiss) and no one paid him any mind!
But I know how this mindset gets started: Some places, somewhere, somehow, are admittedly off-limits, or with a permit system. These stories get circulated fast, thanx to the modern internet world. So the newbie reading this thinks "aha, I wonder if there's any rules in my town. I better go ask!" Whereas if he'd have never heard of such things, he would have had no reason to think he might somehow be illegal. Such was the climate of things in the mid to late 1970s, before the advent of the FMDAC and before the internet. We just never had any reason to think otherwise, because afterall, the park is public right? It wasn't till the FMDAC mailers of the mid 1980s that we read about any such state problems or whatever. Then the snow-ball effect happens, as people start inquiring in their locales, where, previously, it was never even given second thought.
