California Medical Association’s Moral Failure on Suppressors
During my senior year in medical school, a madman in town randomly attacked several people with a hammer, slaying two and injuring eight others. Our chief of plastic surgery, a noted reconstructive surgeon, repaired the killer’s flexor tendons after he had attempted suicide by slitting his wrists. “He can hold a hammer again,” our teacher wryly noted after the successful trauma surgery. But with that bit of dark humor, he reinforced to us students a revered tenet of medical ethics—the principle of non-maleficence. That is, a doctor should never in the course of his or her professional work willfully do harm to another person. And that goes for the least among us, even a vile murderer.
The California Medical Association (CMA), in a callous move, has chosen to expedite harm to a group of people its leaders have held in contempt for decades—gun owners. Specifically, the CMA has refused to approve a resolution endorsing firearm suppressors (sometimes inaccurately called silencers) for hearing protection. These doctors, although they will furiously deny it to themselves and us, wish permanent and untreatable hearing loss on gun owners.
A little background here—in just a few years suppressors have been transformed, in the public mind, from an Al Capone-era gangster movie prop to a standard firearm accessory available in most states and widely across Europe. All but eight states and the District of Columbia have made suppressors legal, and the federal government has repealed the $200 “transfer tax” enacted in the 1930s to try to limit their use. A federal court has recently struck down the federal tax law that, oddly, still required the onerous registration process.
In just a few years, suppressors have become the go-to hearing protection device for America’s 80 million gun owners. As of July 1, 2026, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) reported 6.5 million suppressors (ATF still calls them “silencers”) registered to American gun owners. These would be hunters and sport shooters, since criminals almost never use suppressors and are disinclined to volunteer for fingerprinting, photos, and entering their names into a federal law enforcement database.
Although the public is still coming around to the truth that suppressors are used by normal people for hearing protection and are not preferred tools of gun-wielding criminals, the science has become well-established. Suppressors help prevent irreversible and untreatable inner ear hearing loss by reducing the punishing noise of gunshots. This noise has long been known to damage the delicate sensory cells of the inner ear.
The American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS) and the Academy of Doctors of Audiology have gone on record in support of suppressors. Noted ear surgeon Roberto A. Cueva, MD, a former president of the prestigious American Otological Society, was a co-author of the AAO-HNS position statement in support of suppressors for hearing protection (disclosure—I was a coauthor as well). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has pronounced suppressors “The only potentially effective noise control method to reduce [shooters’] noise exposure from gunfire.” Suppressors are the very definition of an effective primary public health intervention.
So, why doesn’t the California Medical Association, whose mission statement claims “to promote…the protection of the public health,” heartily lend its official support? The reason becomes clear when we review some history.
A year and a half ago I submitted a resolution through the CMA’s established process for members, for approval by its House of Delegates, the CMA’s policy-making committee. The resolution simply calls for the CMA to endorse suppressors and recommend making their use legal by Californians (mere possession is a crime in California). By the rules, I first submitted it through the two local county medical societies representing doctors in my area. The local societies refused to support the resolution. When asked for a reason, the chair of the local House of Delegates district, family doctor Anupam Gupta, MD, replied “The district members decided not to back the resolution citing alignment with CMA’s existing stance on guns. They also discussed if the issue was Germaine [sic] to the health policy discussion and thought it wouldn’t be a policy to focus on by the CMA.”
From Dr. Gupta’s flippant non-answer emerges a kernel of truth—the CMA’s existing stance on guns has been to support every gun control law endangering California gun owners passed in the last three decades. And that’s quite a few.
One example among many is the notorious Proposition 63, a 2016 California ballot initiative that prohibited continuing to possess firearm magazines holding more than ten rounds. This law, part of which has been struck down in federal court, created a new class of criminals out of people who had not been criminals before. As federal district court judge Roger Benitez wrote in his injunction, “any previously law-abiding person in California who still possesses a firearm magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds will begin their new life of crime.”
Do California Medical Association leaders really harbor such small-minded hatred for people who engage in the ages-old American tradition of gun ownership? Are they so spiteful or callous that they want gun owners not only to suffer an irreversible disability, but to be thrown in prison if they dare to put a muffler on their gun?
The suppressor-support resolution remains in limbo, stalled in a tortuous and glacial process at CMA headquarters. A year and a half now after I submitted the resolution, CMA staff will only tell me that the resolution has been held off from consideration until “a later cycle,” and that it has been assigned an agenda priority of dead last in a list of 18 submitted resolutions. Thus the CMA, in its passive-aggressive way, has made it clear that it has no intention of even considering it.
The CMA prides itself as a champion of “the science and art of medicine, the care and well-being of patients, the protection of the public health, the betterment of the medical profession, and…health equity and justice.” But it lacks the decency and basic human compassion to support that health for a particular class of people it has only contempt for—gun owners. For this, the leaders of the California Medical Association should be deeply ashamed.
About Timothy Wheeler:
Timothy Wheeler, MD is a retired head and neck surgeon living in southern California. He is Director Emeritus of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation. Dr. Wheeler got his training at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University Hospitals, and the Cleveland Clinic. He has authored dozens of opinion articles on the medical profession’s culture war on gun owners, appeared on national TV and multiple radio programs, has testified before California Senate and U.S. Senate and House committees on matters of guns and public health, and recently has authored a resolution endorsing firearm suppressors for hearing protection, adopted by the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.