If I'm OCing in Va and I was stopped by LEO and they asks to check the serial # of my handgun am I obligated to comply???
First, lets define "I was stopped". The word stop when combined with police denotes a seizure of your person for the purposes of the 4th Amendment.
Stop, traffic stop, Terry Stop, detention, and
detainment all share a particular characteristic: your police encounter is not voluntary; you are seized.
Lets also make a distinction between a cop's request and a demand.
The easiest answer, as already mentioned, is the cop can ask/request anything. It does not necessarily mean you are required to comply.
Next, VA has no statute requiring an OCer to surrender his gun to a cop for a serial number check.
However, for the officer's safety and the safety of those nearby, a cop can temporarily seize your gun if he has legal grounds to seize you. Re-stated: if the cop has legal grounds to seize you, then he can also temporarily seize your gun for officer safety. The legal rationale is explained in a series of court cases beginning with
Terry vs Ohio for seizures on foot. Traffic stops and seizures that occur while in a motor vehicle are addressed in
Michigan vs Long and similar cases. In any event, the cases all end up at the same place--if the cop can temporarily seize you, he can also temporarily seize your gun for officer safety.
When he has the gun under his control, another legal doctrine kicks in:
plain view searches. Basically, if a cop has a legal right to be somewhere, anything he sees in plain view is fair game, meaning that he does not need probable cause or a warrant to just point his eyeballs at anything that is already in plain view. After he has your gun in his hands for officer safety, all he has to do is look at the serial number.
And, then you have the whole issue of whether a cop is playing by the rules or just doing whatever he wants in demanding your gun solely to run the serial number. In VA there is a court case,
Commonwealth vs Christian, that says in so many words that the right to resist false arrest does
not extend to unjustified seizures of the person. If you are being illegally arrested, you can,
in theory, use reasonable force to resist and prevent the false arrest. But, if you are illegally detained, you may not legally resist physically. I'll bet $20 that any VA court will side with the cops against anyone who tries to physically resist an illegal temporary gun seizure.
Under the existing state of the law, you can verbally withhold your consent to a seizure. This is sometimes called
refusing consent. Its important to understand that refusing consent stops at verbal. It absolutely does not include enforcing your refused consent by physical resistance. If a cop has legal grounds to seize, it won't matter whether you refuse consent--the law gives him the authority to make the seizure, overriding your consent. The main point in refusing consent is to avoid triggering another little legal pitfall--the legal doctrine that if you consent to a search or seizure, it automatically becomes a
reasonable search or seizure and bypasses 4th Amendment protections. This little tactic on the part of the government gets its so-called legitimacy from the idea that the 4th Amend. only prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. You can double-check this info by viewing the YouTube videos about police encounters by FlexYourRights.org. Or, going directly to their website.
Put all the foregoing together and you come up with a picture something along the lines of this: If the cop indicates he wants to see the serial number, whether a request or demand, you can refuse consent. If he continues by turning the request into a demand, or just telling you not to move while he removes the gun, about all you can safely do is repeat your refused consent. If he
really wants the gun, he's
going to get it. And, I would not recommend physically resisting.
I am not a lawyer. You will want to verify the foregoing by checking cases and website I cited, viewing the videos I mentioned, and making up your own mind, or consult a lawyer.