NICS Data Reporting Act of 2026

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 2267) to require the Attorney General to submit to the Congress a report that includes the demographic data of persons determined to be ineligible to purchase a firearm based on a background check performed by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 2267.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, today we are bringing to the floor the NICS Data Reporting Act. It was inspired in the Judiciary Committee by a conversation that I had with the late Sheila Jackson Lee.

I became aware of a problem with the NICS background check system because John Lott, who is an author of many books, an economist, and a statistician, worked at the Department of Justice and has been privy to some of this data and has discovered that the NICS background check system doesn't work like we think it does, or may actually, in fact, have a racial prejudice built into it.

That is a problem because the right to keep and bear arms, like all fundamental rights protected in the Constitution and given to us by God, should not be based on race, sex, or religion.

The NICS system--that stands for National Instant Criminal Background Check System--is a program that was instituted many years ago that you have to go through when you want to purchase a firearm. You fill out a Form 4473 at the gun store, and you record some affirmations on there that you are not a felon, that you don't use drugs, and you also put on there some demographic data.

The DOJ collects this data, but they have never let us see it. I think we could learn some things and improve their system if we could see this data.

As soon as you fill out the form, they send it in to the central database, and they check to see if you are a prohibited person. In other words, have you been convicted of a crime for which you could serve a year or more, or have you been mentally adjudicated as defective according to this system.

What happens when it does this check is the computers will look for phonetically similar names, and if you share a name, unfortunately, with somebody who is a criminal, even if you are not a convicted criminal yourself, you could be denied the purchase of a firearm. In fact, there have been 2 million denials since this system was put into place in the 1980s. In any given year, we have seen over 100,000 denials, but we know these are mostly false denials because there have only been 12 Federal convictions in a year where there were 100,000 denials.

The problem is, you can appeal this, and if it is your first appeal, you don't get it overridden, you have to employ lawyers. When you have to spend a lot of money to exercise a constitutional right, you are effectively being deprived of that right.

Here is what we believe. If you looked at the data, what you will find is that Black Americans are three times more likely to get a false denial in the NICS background check system and that Hispanic Americans are twice as likely to get a false denial from the NICS background check system as a White American might be.

Why is this? Because they share similar names, surnames and first names, within racial and ethnic groups. If you are in one of these groups and share one of these names with somebody who has been convicted, you can be deprived of the ability to purchase a gun.

This is a problem. We want to see the data, and that is the purpose of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I want to be clear about the purpose of the bill. It is not to collect more information on prospective gun buyers. It is to know the information we have, what has been collected, what can we infer from those things.

For instance, on the form, we already collect race and ethnicity. The purpose of this bill is not to tell us individual details about the people who purchase the guns. We want to know these numbers in the aggregate so that nobody's particular traits or names will be disclosed as gun owners. We just need to know what it looks like statistically.

There has been a question from some of my conservative colleagues as to why the bill asks for both gender and sex. The reason for that is, before 2016, the form 4473 used to ask what your gender was. After 2016, it asks what your sex is.

The language of the law doesn't suggest that those two things are different things. It just acknowledges that the data that has been collected over the years has been collected under two different terms, and we want to know all the data.

Mr. Speaker, banks also do background checks on prospective tellers and employees of the banks. Imagine if a bank had an error in their system that caused Black tellers or Hispanic tellers to fail the background check more than White tellers or other bank employees. The bank would be sued out of existence. Yet, we have a government system that we believe probably does this, so that is why we need to know the data.

My goal with this is that we improve the system and that we make it not sloppy. What will the improvement yield? It will take out the racial bias in the system that exists right now. It will also mean that all races, whether you are White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian, and whether you are male or female, there will be no bias because we will check for your actual name and your actual birthday and clean this system up.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson), who is also a member of the Judiciary Committee and who, in fact, improved this bill before it came to the floor. We marked it up in the Committee on the Judiciary. He had a suggestion. In order not to delay the bill or the passage of it through committee, I assured the gentleman that I would work with him before it came to the floor.

A lot of times, that is a euphemism, and it never happens, but we did, in fact, insert the language from Hank Johnson's office directly into this bill. It was not because I wanted to cut a deal but because it actually made the bill better. We will find out not just the demographics of the denials but also the demographics of the people who overturned their denials. This is important, too, for improving the system.

Mr. Speaker, I urge passage of this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 2267, the NICS Data Reporting Act, which would require the Attorney General to submit an annual report to Congress providing demographic data about the individuals who receive denials from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, NICS, as part of an attempted firearm purchase in the preceding year.

The NICS background system has processed more than 300 million checks since the FBI launched the system in 1998. NICS checks are critical to enforcing our laws that keep certain disqualified individuals from possessing a firearm.

The overwhelming majority of NICS checks determine that a prospective purchaser may legally purchase a firearm, and these checks are typically completed in just a few minutes. But in some instances, a NICS search determines that a person may not legally purchase a firearm because the person is matched to a serious criminal conviction, a domestic violence restraining order, a dishonorable discharge from the armed services, a wanted person's list, or other disqualifying record.

Since its inception, NICS has denied sales to more than 1.5 million transactions, keeping firearms out of the hands of dangerous people who should not have them.

The sponsor of this legislation, Congressman Massie, has cited evidence suggesting that Black and Hispanic men may be more likely to experience false denials since, due to over-incarceration, they are disproportionately likely to share a name with other Black or Hispanic men who are incarcerated.

Mr. Massie has also expressed concern that erroneous NICS denials may disproportionately affect people based not just on race, ethnicity, and national origin, but also on sex, gender, age, disability, income, and English language proficiency.

This is why his legislation asks for the demographic data of individuals denied firearms through NICS for each of the categories I just listed. There is absolutely no harm in seeking this information. We need data and facts to understand our complex world, to craft responsive legislation, and to determine how to allocate government funding.

In fact, when I was in North Carolina representing people who had been wrongly stopped by law enforcement officials, we instituted a data collection system that looks into whether or not people have been detained based on their race or their gender, and it has been very effective.

NICS is an essential tool that keeps guns out of dangerous people's hands. We should seek to learn more about how NICS is working and make improvements, if any are necessary. We need a universal violent criminal background check to close loopholes in current laws, like the internet loophole and the gun show loophole.

I support this legislation, and I urge my Republican colleagues to stand with us in supporting public access to all information, including demographic data, so that we can be certain that our laws and our government are working for every American.

I urge my colleagues to support this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close.

Mr. Speaker, this bill would require the Attorney General to provide demographic information about NICS denials. I support collecting data to better understand and evaluate the effectiveness of NICS and determine whether it needs to be strengthened in any way.

Mr. Speaker, in memory of Sheila Jackson Lee, I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.