Suppressors are legal to own in 42 states. Eight states and Washington, D.C. prohibit them outright. Fifteen of the 42 tie lawful possession to federal registration, and hunting rules diverge from ownership rules in three states. Find your state below.
Every state is an equal-size tile in roughly its real position, so Rhode Island and Delaware stay clickable. Select any state for the statute, the penalty, and the hunting rules.
Tile positions are schematic and do not represent land area or borders. Fifteen states tie lawful possession to federal registration or compliance, and three of those fifteen, Colorado, Montana and Pennsylvania, have statutes that do not give a clean answer. Why that matters after August 5.
“Are suppressors legal in my state” is the question everyone asks, and it is the least useful one. Three separate things decide whether you are on solid ground, and they do not line up neatly.
Forty-two do. Eight plus the District of Columbia do not, and their bans differ more than you would expect. Hawaii carries a flat mandatory five years without probation. D.C. is a one-year misdemeanor. Rhode Island sets a minimum of a year and a day and no maximum at all. Massachusetts bans possession despite a section heading that only mentions selling, giving and using.
Fifteen do, and this is the part that matters most after the August 5 ruling. Ohio names the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record outright. Washington writes federal registration into the offense itself. Nevada puts the burden of proving federal authorization on you in the statutory text. Others are looser, and three, Colorado, Montana and Pennsylvania, do not give a clean answer at all.
In the other twenty-seven states, your state law does not condition possession on federal registration. That does not make the federal questions go away. The ruling page walks through what is still unresolved, including what happens the first time you cross into one of the fifteen.
This is modeled separately on every page here, because ownership and hunting diverge and the hunting rules are what put people in front of a warden. Connecticut lets you own a suppressor and bans hunting with one in a single sentence of statute. Georgia restricts it by land status rather than by species. Louisiana permits it only for an enumerated list of game. Hunting rules also change by agency action between seasons, which is why every state page tells you to read the current guide rather than trust us.
Each state page quotes the statute rather than paraphrasing it, and links the official state source so you can check our work. Where a state’s code sits behind a paywall or a JavaScript viewer we say so instead of publishing a quote we could not verify. Indiana is the clearest example: we describe the law and give you the citation, but we do not put words in quotation marks that we were unable to retrieve.
Green means your state adds no federal-registration layer. Amber means it does, or that the statute is unsettled. Red means possession is prohibited outright.
Capitol Armory ships to all 42 suppressor-friendly states with direct-to-door delivery.