VA · jury_instructions
Va. Model Jury Instr. Crim. No. 18.520
“Sawed-Off” Shotgun—Definition
A “sawed-off” shotgun is any weapon, loaded or unloaded, originally designed as a shoulder
weapon, utilizing a self-contained cartridge from which a number of ball shot pellets or projectiles
may be fired simultaneously from a smooth or rifled bore by a single function of the firing device,
and which has a barrel length of less than eighteen (18) inches for smooth bore weapons and
sixteen (16) inches for rifled weapons. A weapon of less than .225 caliber is not a sawed-off
shotgun.
History
Virginia Model Jury Instructions – Criminal, Release 26, October 2025. The unannotated set, posted by the Supreme Court of Virginia at vacourts.gov; the book states that it is made available with the permission of the publisher, Matthew Bender & Company, Inc.
Provenance
- Source
- vacourts.gov
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-11
- Edition
- crim-2025-10-01
- Content hash
3e96cb204cd978c64dcd4542eb9ec882636eb0feabac2b5cc8038199936ab91e
The link goes to the issuing authority’s own document — the one we read to produce this record. Where a source publishes whole titles rather than sections, your browser may need a moment to jump to the provision.
Unofficial copy of government-published law, reproduced from official sources with full provenance. Not an official publication; verify against official sources before relying on it in a filing. Records in the 'guidance' corpus, and only that corpus, are sub-regulatory (interpretive guidelines, survey procedures) and are not binding law. Validity bounds follow each jurisdiction's declared temporalBasis.