[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 80 (Tuesday, May 12, 2026)]
[House]
[Pages H3369-H3370]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1640
NICS DATA REPORTING ACT OF 2026
Mr. MASSIE. 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.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
The text of the bill is as follows:
H.R. 2267
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ``NICS Data Reporting Act of
2026''.
SEC. 2. NICS REPORT.
Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this
Act, and annually thereafter, the Attorney General shall
submit to the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate and
the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of
Representatives a report containing, with respect to the
preceding year, the demographic data of persons who were
determined to be ineligible to purchase a firearm based on a
background check performed by the National Instant Criminal
Background Check System, which shall include, disaggregated
by the reason for the determination of ineligibility, the
following:
(1) The race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, age,
disability, average annual income, and English language
proficiency, if available.
(2) In the case of each person whose determination of
ineligibility was overturned on appeal, the race, ethnicity,
national origin, sex, gender, age, disability, average annual
income, and English language proficiency, if available.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from
Kentucky (Mr. Massie) and the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms.
Ross) each will control 20 minutes.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Kentucky.
General Leave
Mr. MASSIE. 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.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentleman from Kentucky?
There was no objection.
Mr. MASSIE. 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.
Ms. ROSS. 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.
[[Page H3370]]
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. MASSIE. 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.
{time} 1650
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.
Ms. ROSS. 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.
Mr. MASSIE. 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.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion offered by the
gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Massie) that the House suspend the rules
and pass the bill, H.R. 2267, as amended.
The question was taken; and (two-thirds being in the affirmative) the
rules were suspended and the bill, as amended, was passed.
A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.
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