Re: Why aren't you or your club a member of the FMDAC? (looking for feedback)
Marc said:
As someone who has traveled, and experienced different forms of governance...
I think America needs one thing. BAD. "LAW LIMITS".
No new laws should be enacted without repealing another. (on federal, state, and local levels)
How many laws are there in the "Land Of The Free?".
That's the question today, and your homework assignment.

How many?
Marc,
Once, on this very forum a long time ago, I noted that America has so many laws that nobody really knows how many there are. One person actually challenged this as a "conspiracy theory", yet he could not name how many laws.
The problem is that lawmakers find that the path of least resistance for them personally is to enact further restrictions whenever they feel like it, or whenever some special interest group clamors. Bad hair day? Pass a law. Coffee too cold? Pass another law. Trip over your own shoelace? More laws.
Our young people, faced with a nation of 10,000 laws, learn that only one thing is certain: might makes right. More laws do not create more compliance. They create more lawlessness.
Gesture politics and lazy lawmaking have helped put us on a gradually sinking ship. There is no legitimate reason why lawmakers should be so afraid of the "R" word (repeal), unless of course they're not being entirely forthright about what it is they're trying to do in (or should I say "to") the good old U.S. of A. I have already said enough, not wanting to turn this into a non-metal-detecting thread-- and hijacking Nick's topic, which I don't want to do-- so I will say no more in that vein.
A lot of detectorists need to think about what they've done or not done to support direct lobbying efforts to protect this hobby against the gesture-politics crew and their contingent. Donating 10 or 20 bucks in clad to WWATS or FMDAC might not be a bad idea. How hard is it, really?
There should be a mechanism for hobbyists to be able to make finds on public lands. It benefits nobody to have metal artifacts slowly decaying in the ground. A lot of the coins and artifacts posted on Tnet are only 150 years old, yet they're already missing details, and in some cases corrosion has already annihilated major structural features.
(edited post, was getting too long... sorry Nick)