Metal Detecting exams advocated by collectors' rights advocate

Californian collectors' "rights" activist and part-time coin dealer Dave Welsh reckons that metal detectors should be licenced, and:

a license to operate a metal detector should include (as does a license to drive an automobile) a requirement to pass an examination verifying knowledge of all relevant laws and ethical obligations which pertain to the activities of metal detectorists.

I guess that's because he does not use one himself. Has he really thought this through? This would mean that metal detector users in Bulgaria (for example) would be examined on the laws that prevent them passing on the coins they find to middlemen who then export them to the United States for people like Mr Welsh to sell. Well, of course there is a difference between knowing the law and abiding by it I suppose, so licence or not, I expect US dealers and collectors will continue to get their heaps of metal-detected 'dugups' extracted from some foreign archaeological field. Its not the diggers that need regulating, but the no-questions-asked market, Mr Welsh. Anyway what kind of collectors' "rights" is this upholding? Are metal detectorists in Britain and the USA for example not portable antiquity collectors too? Are they perhaps in Mr Welsh's eyes some kind of inferior collectors that he will willingly condone (nay, recommend) licencing them, but (as far as I know) not licencing the acquisitions of heaps-of-coin-collecting ACCG members? What makes him think the latter are so "special" and immune to what he would force on other collectors? I say let collectors rights advocates stand up for the rights of ALL portable antiquity collectors, or none. No discrimination.

ADDENDUM: Ah, now he's backtracking. He now specifies that he would not advocate requiring such a license in the USA:

however in European and Middle Eastern countries which restrict export of antiquities, I believe it would be appropriate to require detectorists to be licensed.

I really cannot understand this fixation with export. Export, export, export. Its not primarily the metal detector users that illegally export items from countries like Bulgaria, is it? The USA has an archaeological record (I learnt the other day that even tincans can be part of it) and it follows that inappropriate metal detector use there is just as damaging as anywhere else that has an archaeological record. Yes or no? Surely there are laws to learn and ethics to be observed in metal detecting in the USA, so why would no exam testing the detector users knowledge of them be needed in Mr Welsh's view? Because Americans are somehow "better" than the rest of us? So what actually is the guy on about? What is this "licence" he proposes for?

Mr Welsh seems blissfully unaware that in countries where the state manages the archaeological record like the ones he mentioned earlier, legal metal detector use to search for relics can already only take place with a permit. As is the case in Great Britain if the searcher wants to search certain locations which have such restrictions imposed, and indeed any part of Northern Ireland (part of the UK).