After a bit of a slump in 2025, it looks like the firearms industry is going great guns in the U.S. (no pun intended … maybe …) through 2026. April’s NICS numbers show more year-over-year growth in the firearms world, although the change is slight.
Slug Guns & Ammunition @ TFB:
What NICS numbers tell us
The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (aka NICS) is a database that firearms dealers can use to determine if a potential purchaser is banned from buying guns. It’s used constantly by gun stores, and obviously, if NICS numbers go up, you can therefore surmise that gun sales are going up … sort of.
NICS numbers aren’t a hard-and-fast rule; one inquiry to the NICS database can cover the sale of multiple firearms, or no firearms at all. Perhaps the sale was denied or didn’t go through for other reasons, and in some states, NICS is also used for other inquiries not related to gun sales.
And, some states also have their own database they use to determine a purchaser’s eligibility to legally own firearms; they don’t participate in NICS at all. The best way to view NICS numbers is through the adjusted figures provided by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). The NSSF’s adjusted numbers are tallied using the shooting industry’s own figures and can be considered to be more accurate than the federal database’s reckoning.
April’s numbers
In April 2026, the NSSF-adjusted NICS numbers seem to indicate the federal database was accessed 1,193,428 times. Again, there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between inquiries and individual gun sales, but the NSSF is confident enough in its figures to say that this is a 1.6 increase year-over-year in the NICS numbers from April, 2025.
According to the FBI’s non-adjusted numbers, there was an 11.9 year-over-year decrease from the NICS numbers of April, 2025.
If the NSSF’s numbers are right, it’s part of a trend in recent months of small increases from 2025’s slump numbers; the industry isn’t in a booming growth period, but they certainly must be happy to see movement in the right direction.
