German Collectors Guilty

The petition "Für den Erhalt des privaten Sammelns" (sic) has now 3,723 supporters in Germany. This is the country where the media have been stressing that illicit artefacts from southern Europe and the Middle East may be responsible for financing organized crime and civil war. Nearly four thousand German collectors show they do not give a tinkers for any of that, they just want the continued ability to buy paperless antiquities and shut their eyes to where they come from. This is who collectors are.

The site where the petition was organized has some interesting features which allow the information to be analysed from a number of points of view. Here is the graph of progress of the petition (I have a feeling that in the next few days we will see some more populist alarmist anti-due-diligence material from the dealers to chivvy collectors along), and the map of where these collectors are. The black spots are festering wounds on the face of Germany's image, but in fact highlight the main population centres. It would seem that in Germany coin collecting is primarily the preserve of urban dwellers rather than the population as a whole. Is there perhaps some kind of psychological reason for this?