Monday 29 April 2013

Renewed Focus on UK Metal Detecting: Metal Detectorist Deals with Trespassers on "His" (sic) land

.
The video by Ged Dodd (ironically calling himself "Peacehavens") "How to deal with Pirates" is very instructive about the attitudes of entitlement they feel towards the property of others.



"That's the way to do it!" he cackles as he dreams about blowing somebody's son/brother/father into oblivion. Surely the landowner is the one to decide whether any action is to be taken against a trespasser, and I suggest that not many would be willing to actually contemplate the legal consequences of the action postulated by self-centred tekkies. Note the forum thread on it is called: "How to protect your fields, LOL". Note the "your".

UPDATE  30.04.13
Devon metal detectorist Sam LeBailly writes (in a comment to this post) "You agree that illegal detectorists need to be brought to justice too don't you?" Umm, no, certainly not like that. This is not "justice", it is not even vigilante justice as I really cannot see here the evidence that any crime was being committed. I think if I posted a "joke" video showing "how to deal with looters" showing a similar vision, not only the metal detectorists would be up in arms about it, and quite rightly so.

Trespass in England is a misdemeanour, not a crime, still less a capital offence. Note that the person squatting could be anyone from a Ministry of Agriculture inspector, a geological survey staff member, a green-waste quality inspector, an entomologist, and may well be on the land with the landowner's full permission and knowledge. The man who came equipped-to-shoot did not challenge the assumed intruder, just blows his head off with no provocation, no warning.

If "that's the way to do it" in tekkie mentality (as Mr LeBailly seems to suggest, as does Mr Steve Taylor in a subsequent comment), then I think we can see why some people think these individuals need to be treated as potentially dangerous. If I were a landowner, I'd not let anyone like that anywhere near my land.  


5 comments:

Unknown said...

Jesus christ man, you really need to chill... The guy's just having a joke. You agree that illegal detectorists need to be brought to justice too don't you? That's why you make these pathetic little blog posts.

Paul Barford said...

Mr Le Bailly, I think I am among a relatively large number of people who simply do not think this kind of "tekkie humour" is at all funny.

Neither do I like the idea of tekkie "justice" - especially bearing in mind what we actually see in this film which is a wholly unprovoked attack.

Paul Barford said...

Somebody writing under yet another silly assumed name (who I assume to be a metal detectorist - and most likely since he was reading this post at the time the comments were sent, Steve Taylor) seems to agree that this is a perfectly acceptable way for a metal detectorist to behave given the "circumstances" and then launching on a particularly nasty personal attack on me for drawing attention to it.

[When Mr Taylor learns to write comments that I am going to publish (which are using his own name, and address the points made rather than just being nasty about the blog's author) I will post them. Until then, he will be most of the time unsuccessful putting his views forward by the medium of my blog - which I rather think is what he's aiming at anyway.]

Unknown said...

I don’t know where I stand on this really, perhaps if it was longer it might not be so offensive?

Why would a Snooker player be posting offensive comments on your blog?

Paul Barford said...

Its another guy, this one is a metal detectorist who runs a self-employed "gardening services" firm in Cheltenham and obviously - to judge by the number of times he access this blog a day, work has been slow over the winter, and it would seem he has very little else to occupy his time...

and yes, he is a very offensive individual, but his fellow metal detectorists encourage him in that, which in turn tells you something about the milieu as a whole.

 
Creative Commons License
Ten utwór jest dostępny na licencji Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa-Bez utworów zależnych 3.0 Unported.