By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The National Shooting Sports Foundation’s release of adjusted figures from the National Instant Check System (NICS) shows March producing a 1.9 percent increase in the number of NICS-related checks dealing with probably gun transactions over March 2025.
According to NSSF, the figure of 1,412,917 NICS checks surpassed the number from March last year, which was 1,386,724.
“For comparison,” NSSF said in a news release, “the unadjusted March 2026 FBI NICS figure of 2,212,094 reflects a 10.5 percent decrease from the unadjusted FBI NICS figure of 2,470,705 in March 2025.”
“March’s Adjusted NICS figure of over 1.4 million checks for the sale of a firearm represents a healthy and steady growth in the interest of Americans to freely exercise their Second Amendment rights,” said Mark Oliva, NSSF Public Affairs managing director. “This is most evident in Virginia, where legislation sits on Governor Abigail Spanberger’s desk to unconstitutionally ban an entire class of firearms. Virginians are quite literally voting with their wallets on how they view this pending ban. Virginia’s background checks for all firearms sold increased by 70 percent over the same month last year, to 79,383 background checks which was up from 46,659 this time last year. That follows a 55 percent increase reported in February’s background check figures. We expect this figure to continue to rise, as it is expected Governor Spanberger will ignore the will of the citizens of the Commonwealth to violate her own state constitution and the U.S. Constitution to bar the sale of the most-popular selling centerfire rifle in America today – the Modern Sporting Rifle.”
According to NSSF data, the Top 5 states for NICS checks last month were:
| Texas | 26,248 |
| Florida | 14,364 |
| Virginia | 8,874 |
| North Carolina | 8,831 |
| Georgia | 8,661 |
In addition, the Top 5 states for handgun checks were Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, California and Virginia, while the same states were leaders in long gun background checks, though not in the same order.
According to NSSF, “The adjusted NICS data were derived by subtracting out NICS purpose code permit checks and permit rechecks used by states for CCW permit application checks as well as checks on active CCW permit databases. NSSF started subtracting permit rechecks in February 2016.”
