Today (Tuesday), I reintroduced the Firearm Due Process Protection Act. This legislation provides legal recourse for law-abiding Americans who were improperly denied the ability to legally purchase a firearm due to administrative errors during a background check and increases congressional oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It is cosponsored by 14 of Emmer’s Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives.

Every year, thousands of law-abiding Americans are wrongfully prohibited from exercising their constitutional right to own a firearm, not because they are criminals, but because of bureaucratic errors. Our legislation provides important legal pathways for Americans whose Second Amendment rights are wrongfully restricted and reestablishes congressional oversight of the FBI and the NICS system. We are grateful to our colleagues for their support of this commonsense legislation.

“Rep. Emmer’s bill would help protect gun owners from the broken National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The system disproportionately targets minorities and individuals with common last names, either rejecting background checks due to cultural spellings of names or falsely flagging individuals as criminals because they share a common last name. To remediate this failure, Rep. Emmer’s bill allows for affected individuals to seek recourse through litigation,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for the Gun Owners of America.

Background

Every year, thousands of law-abiding Americans are erroneously denied the right to purchase a firearm due to administrative failures in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Despite the Fix NICS Act requiring a 60-day deadline for appeals, the process remains a frustrating and arduous process, with no mechanism to enforce this deadline. The most recent NICS Operations Report documented 22,615 appeals, only 6,263 were overturned. The cases that were overturned were primarily overturned due to mismatched fingerprints and inaccurate criminal records.

If a law-abiding American is denied their right to a firearm, and NICS does not follow through on its 60-day appeal deadline, all information relating to the appeal is destroyed after 90 days and the individual must restart the appeals process from square one.

The Firearm Due Process Protection Act protects Americans’ constitutional rights by reaffirming the Fix NICS Act’s 60-day deadline for federal officials to come to a determination on an appeal. It reforms the current appeals system by giving law-abiding Americans the right to seek a court judgment to correct erroneous information if the FBI does not act on an appeal within a two-month deadline. Finally, it increases congressional oversight of the FBI by requiring them to submit statistics regarding the total number of appeals, the total number that are overturned, and the reasons they were overturned or upheld to Congress every year.