Metal Detecting in Mississippi

1. The rule, in full

Mississippi – 40 Miss. Code R. 6-1.2

Read from Part 6 of Title 40, "Mississippi State Parks", as supplied directly by the Mississippi Secretary of State in answer to a records request, 8 Oct

• 65,951 characters extracted. Rule 1.2's own history line reads "Revised June 2025".
  Previously this entry was sourced "via law.cornell.edu" – a mirror, which METHODOLOGY rule 11 excludes. sos.ms.gov blocks this project and the Secretary of State offered no explanation for that; the office simply sent the document. Two claims in the old entry did not survive the primary source and are dealt with below. Operative text, Title 40, Part 6, Chapter 1, Rule 1.2, item 17:

"No one shall use metal detectors on any Mississippi State Park. (See, MISS. CODE ANN. §39-7-4)" Source: MISS. CODE ANN. §§49-1-29, 49-4-4, and 55-3-33.

No permit exception appears anywhere in Part 6. "Detector" occurs once in the whole part, in the sentence above, so there is no authorisation route to find and none to look for. That is unusual: most states that prohibit detecting name an officer who may permit it.

Note the parenthetical cross-reference the rule carries to Miss. Code Ann. §39-7-4, the Mississippi Antiquities Law, which has not been read for this entry.

Scope: Mississippi State Parks under the jurisdiction of the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks.

Determination: state parks only. Does NOT reach municipal parks.

Shepard State Park, corrected 8 Oct 2026. The old entry said the regulation "notes an exception for Shepard State Park, which is operated by the City of Gautier", and implied the state rule might not govern there. The exception is about fees and nothing else. Rule 1.1, State Park Fees, item 4: "All fees set forth above do not apply to Shepard State Park, which is being operated and maintained by the City of Gautier for the State of Mississippi." Rule 1.2's general rules, item 17 among them, carry no Shepard exception at all. So the detector prohibition applies there like anywhere else, and a Gautier reader should be told that rather than the opposite.

CUT 8 Oct 2026: the Wildlife Management Area sentence

The old entry said "The same restriction extends to Wildlife Management Areas." It is unsupported and has been removed rather than rescued.

"Wildlife Management" appears once in Part 6, and it is about hunting: "Hunting or trapping is prohibited within the confines of state parks except Leroy Percy Wildlife Management Area and Natchez State Park." That is not support for extending a detector prohibition to WMAs; it is a different activity in a different direction.

Open lead, unread rather than absent. Mississippi WMAs are administered by the same department under different regulations, which this project has not opened. It is possible that a WMA detector provision exists. The honest position is the N.J.A.C. 7:11 shape: recorded as a chapter never read, not as a chapter with nothing in it. If it turns out to reach WMAs, that is a sweep finding to make properly, with the provision quoted, rather than a sentence to restore.

Source: Title 40 Part 6, supplied by the Mississippi Secretary of State and read at source 8 Oct 2026.

2. Cities in Mississippi that publish a rule

No city in Mississippi publishes a metal detecting rule we can quote. Of the 42 cities we checked, 12 had pages on the city’s own site that we found and read, and none of those sets out a rule. For the remaining 30 we could not locate a municipal source, so nothing is claimed about them either way.

This is a finding, not a queue. It is also not proof that no rule exists: a city that posts its rules on a noticeboard, or in a document our searches do not surface, looks exactly the same from here.

3. County rules

No county check has been run for Mississippi. That is not a finding that Mississippi’s counties publish no rules. It means the question was never asked here, and this directory does not assert an answer it has not looked for. The county sweep covered 21 states; Mississippi was not one of them.

4. Cities checked - no published rule

42 cities in Mississippi were checked and have no published rule on this page. Of those, 42 returned no rule, and 0 did return something that has not been published – mostly rules that turned out to govern county land, which are in the county section above. A city here is not a city where detecting is allowed. It is a city whose own published material did not answer the question.

All 42 were checked on 13 September 2026, in one sweep, so that date applies to every row. 3 have no municipal site recorded and are shown without a link rather than dropped, because dropping them would understate what was checked.

5. Land this page does not cover

This page answers for Mississippi state land, and for city and county land where the state rule reaches it. Several other kinds of ground are not covered here, and naming them is more honest than letting a reader assume the page is complete.

Tribal land. This directory does not cover it, and will not.

There are 574 federally recognised tribal nations. Each is a sovereign jurisdiction with its own law, its own permitting, its own enforcement and its own cultural-resource provisions, and none of them is answered by a state's code or by any federal rule quoted on these pages. A one-line instruction to "get tribal permission" would be worse than this paragraph, because it implies one process and one authority where there are 574. If you are on or near tribal land, the governing law is that nation's, and the place to ask is that nation's own offices. Nothing on this page applies there.

BLM land is covered, partly, in its own place. The Bureau of Land Management holds about 245 million acres and the federal rule names metal detectors and permits them, which is the opposite of the national park rule. See BLM land: the detector is named, and permitted. That page covers the base regulation; it does not yet cover the supplementary rules individual BLM State Directors issue for particular field offices.

Named and not examined. These are recorded so their absence is visible rather than silent. No claim is made about any of them:

• Military withdrawn land, including ranges and training areas.
• Bureau of Reclamation land, which surrounds a great many reservoirs.
• Water district and irrigation district land.
• Wilderness, Wilderness Study Areas and National Conservation Areas, which carry designations of their own. And one general point about signs. The commonest piece of reasoning in this subject is "there was no sign, so it was allowed." Arizona's State Land Department answers it in writing, in condition 2 of its own Recreational Permit terms:

"You will comply with all laws, rules, regulations and ordinances. Posting is not required for these provisions to be enforceable."

That is Arizona's sentence about Arizona's provisions and this directory does not present it as the law of any other state. But the proposition it states is the one to carry: nothing read for this project makes a published rule's enforceability depend on a sign at the boundary. Where posting does matter, a specific provision says so, and that provision is quoted on the page where it occurs.