If there’s one thing I’ve learned from other people’s experience with the gun police, it’s don’t wander into gray areas when the state is looking for reasons to put you in jail for being a gun owner:
Here’s what I’m wondering. Using something like a braided steel fishing leader and some lead split shot, I could conceivably drill small holes in the channel near the base of the mag (where it won’t interfere with the spring and follower) and securing the thin steel cable there by creating a lead tag of a melted lead split shot. Then, run the cable up the mag body inside the channel on the outside of the mag and hang them outside of the lower receiver. Close the action and attach lead tags to the steel cables on the outside of the action. Now, you have a magazine that can be attached without removing the standard mag release button, but can’t be detached without opening the action. The cables and tags wouldn’t get in the way of the operation according to my Mk. I eyeball. And there should be no problems with the receiver closing on the cable.
Good idea, bad idea? Completely idiotic? I mean the idea, not the laws that inspired it – I know they’re idiotic.
It depends on whether you want to sit in front a jury, explaining all this to them and hoping they understand it, while the prosecutor tries to explain you’re a dangerous extremist who was illegally manufacturing assault weapons in violation of state laws.
The state will surely argue that all it would take is a pair of wire cutters to convert the AR into an assault weapon, and thus it falls into the “readily modifiable” provision, since it doesn’t neatly fit into one of the exceptions. It is readily modifiable without taking the action apart, because all you have to do is cut the cable.