You'd be pretty hard pressed to get a conviction. That obvoiusly would not mean that your chief wouldn't yank your Lic though.
I agree with this... the level of resources required to get a slam dunk
on all but the most egregious "illegal magazine" cases would be
incredible. On an unmarked magazine you'd have to do some serious
materials science forensic stuff, eg, GC/MS, etc... and even at that point
you'd probably only get evidence regarded as circumstantial, and it would
be a severe waste of resources of that type of equipment.
One thing to keep in mind... if you get dragged into court on a criminal
charge of any kind, keeping your license is at the end of a long series of
concerns. Chances are you're not going to get dragged in for having
a "bad magazine" but likely for something else; eg, you had to defend yourself
and then you get arrested, say in an anti gun locale like boston, and
now the local DA/ada/prosecutor is an anti gun type and wants to put the
screws to you.... Thing is, at that point, anything could happen. If
you have good counsel it's probably moot, but nobody wants to be
"that guy" that the DA decided to use as their "gun control poster boy"
case. I also doubt the jury would convict soley on a magazine
thing, either.. but who knows. Anything is possible in this state... remember
that the "jury of your peers" might have people in it that voted for Deval
Patrick. This state is going so corrupt that eventually it'll leak into the
juries, too. "Oh no, the person mr so and so defended himself against... he
was turning his life around and... " (I'll stop here, before I start to puke).
FWIW I don't think such a case even exists in MA. I've seen plenty of
cases where they arrested and charged someone for having a gun without
a license, or having a gun without a license plus a magazine and ammo
they weren't supposed to have either, etc... but those were all charges under
the licensing scheme and not under the MA AWB. I would guess that
it's a lot easier to prove those, since the person not having a license to
lawfully possess something is a lot easier to "prove" than how old someone's magazine is or isn't.
-Mike