Just Say No, it's About Responsibility, Not "Reputation"

For some reason I find hard to understand, RESCUE ('the Trust for British Archaeology') sees fit to put on their Facebook page an announcement from the National Council for Metal Detecting banning its members from travelling about to go metal detecting during the Coronavirus crisis  (artefact hunting is not archaeology, archaeology is not just artefact hunting - duh). Anyway, what caught my eye in this was that underneath it, an archaeologist comments:

Benjamin Westwood
I can't tell you what a relief this was [sic] amongst FLOs!
Good on the NCMD for taking the responsible course of action.

Why can PAS staff just not say "no, I'm not meeting you"? Meeting metal detectorists is not, by any means, absolutely necessary. They should be staying at home and so should the FLOs. If "responsible detectorists" were, actually, responsible, they should not need any National Council to instruct them in how to do that (but if you look at the announcement, you can see that what the NCMD is engaged in is an image-saving exercise - "interpreted as bringing the hobby into disrepute"). 

What part of limit the spread of coronavirus do these people not understand? Pathetic. 

Vignette: Pete the Heritage Pigeon from Bloomsbury confused about the 'reputation' of artefact hunting.