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Legality of dummy rounds in MA?

drgrant said:
I could be wrong but I thought there's some obscure passage in MGL that exempts those from the law.
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Correct. When the 1998 law was passed, you needed an FID to buy them. Sometime afterwards, they changed the law to exempt them. No, I don't have any handy citation but do recall seeing the words in the MGL at some time in the past.
 
Although conventional wisdom is that components==ammo, there was a case recently where some kid was arrested for wearing a belt of linked cartridges.

The charges were dropped when the lab determined they were not capable of being fired, which is suggestive of MA having at least one ADA who is not an idiot.
 
Rob Boudrie said:
Although conventional wisdom is that components==ammo, there was a case recently where some kid was arrested for wearing a belt of linked cartridges.

The charges were dropped when the lab determined they were not capable of being fired, which is suggestive of MA having at least one ADA who is not an idiot.
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Interview with the guy that happened to:
http://noisey.vice.com/blog/an-inte...se-bullet-belt-got-him-arrested-by-the-police

Once apprehended, although the police admittedly determined that the bullets were, in fact, replicas, and not dangerous, they arrested him anyway. The charges included “unlawful possession of ammunition,” “carrying a dangerous weapon unlawfully (spiked/studded gloves and arm bands),” and, for good measure, “disorderly conduct.”
At arraignment, Jake Wark, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office spokesmen told me “prosecutors moved to dismiss the charges primarily on the grounds that the ammunition could not be fired and wasn’t intended to be fired.”
Under Ch. 140, Sect. 121, of the Massachusetts General Laws, he clarified, “a person may be prosecuted for possessing ‘cartridges or cartridge cases… designed for use in any firearm, rifle, or shotgun,’ but we determined that our resources were best directed elsewhere.”
I tracked down Young, who was in the midst of completing 20 hours of community service that he agreed to on the conditions of the charges being dropped, to ask him what happened. Young, an engineer who works in computer networks, is a Boston native, who runs the punk record label Serfs Up, and plays in a couple of bands, including the act Hexxus.
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Noisey: Can you explain what actually happened when you got arrested?
Kevin Young: I was heading to a friend’s house, on the bus in Harvard Square. The bus driver came back and informed me she would not be letting me ride the bus “dressed like that” in her own words. I explained that I’d been riding the bus for years with a bullet belt. I said they were fake and there’s never been a problem before. But rather than fighting her, I decided to get off the bus. I did an internship at the MBTA, and my next door neighbor growing up drove a bus, so I didn’t want to cause these people any grief, they're just driving a bus.
What happened next?
Then, after I got off the bus, I waited for the next one. I got on, and was sitting in the back of the bus minding my own business when the bus crosses Brighton Ave. into lower Allston, and pulls over at the stop by Pizzeria Regina. At that point I was already kind of pissed off that I’d been kicked off one bus. I was like, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m just going to call an Uber. I got off, and while I was waiting, a police officer jumps out of a car and tells me not to move. I explained to them I know why you're here, the bullets are fake, I’m not a threat to anybody. At that point, between 12 to 15 other officers showed up. They had me remove my belt, my bootstraps—the little studded straps on my boots that sometimes hold dummy bullets. They had me remove my gloves and a necklace, basically every accessory I had on my body they made me remove.
They saw that all the primers were struck, they saw that it was completely dummy. At that point, I was standing there with my belt undone my pants falling down, and I kept being like, “Hey can we get this over with? It’s humiliating.” They said, “You scared a lot of people on the bus, we got tons of calls that there was a man with a gun.” I was like, “I don't have a gun, I’m not a threat.” One of the officers didn’t take a liking to me and ordered my arrest.
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What did you have to do for community service?
They told me I could volunteer at any non-profit I wanted
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He could have volunteered to stuff envelopes at GOAL or do legal research for COMM2A.
 
Has anyone really been arrested for possessing a shell casing? If so I would like a link to the story. I would ship it!
 
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