Congressman Neguse Passes Amendment to Increase Funding for the National Instant Background Check System

The amendment calls for a $1 million increase in funding

Washington, D.C.— Congressman Joe Neguse on Friday passed an amendment out of the U.S. House of Representatives to increase funding for the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) by $1 million. The amendment passed along with the H.R. 7617, the Appropriations Minibus. The additional funding to NICS will be allocated to states to improve their criminal and mental health records.

“The National Instant Criminal Background Check System is a critical and life-saving program,” said Congressman Joe Neguse. “The need for improvements to NICS was underscored last April, when a Florida woman, who should not have been able to buy a gun in her home state, traveled to Colorado, passed a background check and bought a shotgun, shutting down schools across the Front Range due to credible threats. This incident and others underscore why it is so critically important that we increase funding for the NICS program so we can enhance it, improve it and ultimately save lives.”

Since the NICS background check system was put into effect, over 308 million background checks have been conducted around the country, leading to the denial of over 3 million firearms sales to prohibited purchasers. In 2018, Colorado conducted 340,816 checks against the NICS system with 6,279 denials. Given the state of Colorado’s history with gun violence, the additional funding will lead to an expansion of the NICS system, resulting in more checks and denials of firearms to prohibited purchasers.

In 2019, Congressman Neguse also successfully advocated for robust funding for the National Instant Background Check System (NICS) and he recently advocated for the Department of Justice to run an audit on the Point of Contact background check system, a system that could have enabled Sol Pais to wrongly pass a background check when she arrived in Colorado last April. Through his role on the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman Neguse has helped pass bipartisan universal background checks out of the U.S. House of Representatives and pass additional gun violence prevention measures out of the Judiciary Committee, including a red flag law and high-capacity magazine ban. In February, he hosted Tom Mauser as his guest at the state of the union to highlight the need for action on Gun Violence—Tom lost his son Daniel Mauser in the Columbine shooting.