I have a collection of guns, yessiree. One is a 1940s Japanese military pistol called a Nambu, acquired by my then-Navy officer father as a souvenir in Tokyo, hours after surrender by the Japanese emperor. (Nambu was a guy.) It may never have been fired. When I called the county police department to ask whether I needed to register it, the officer chuckled and suggested I put it in a shadow box and hang it on the wall as a memento. Anyhow, the Nambu requires hard-to-find 8mm rounds.

The others are also World War II relics. They’ve been in pieces for the past 70 years or so, and the metal parts are pretty badly corroded. I keep telling my wife I’m going to clean them up, put ’em back together, and hang ’em on the wall. Her answer: Not in this house you’re not. Not even in the man-cave.

So my interest in President Barack Obama’s executive action is not as a real gun owner or shooter, but rather constitutional and practical. I will say I know many gun enthusiasts, none of whom would dream of aiming a gun at a person.

I’m not going to discuss the constitutional aspects of the new rules or rulemaking here. But there is one detail of Obama’s proposal that at first I was skeptical about. Namely, the idea that the administration will overhaul the background checking system to “bring it into the 21st century,” a favorite phrase of the President.

Here’s the relevant paragraph from a fact sheet the White House put out:

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation is overhauling the background check system to make it more effective and efficient. The envisioned improvements include processing background checks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and improving notification of local authorities when certain prohibited persons unlawfully attempt to buy a gun. The FBI will hire more than 230 additional examiners and other staff to help process these background checks.”

That would be NICS, or the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The FBI’s homepage for NICS says the system is available 17 hours a day, every day but Christmas. It is a 20th century system, having been launched in 1998. Obama wants to make it 24/7, presumably including Christmas. Lest Santa be delayed at a gun show.

The FBI historically has had a mixed record in developing new systems. It labored to produce a case management system for years in an effort marked by lateness, costliness and re-starts. Last summer, though, it reported its case management system to be in operations and maintenance mode, “with with a rigorous ‘Agile’ release schedule underway.” If it’s agile, it must be good, right? But according to the government’s IT dashboard — which hasn’t been refreshed since August — the upgrade to NICS was going along fine until December 2014. At that point, it started experience schedule and budget slippages.

There’s hope:  Federal News Radio reported FBI success with an overhaul of its venerable online fingerprint system, relaunched a year ago as Next Generation Identification.

Agencies have had tough times developing systems for tracking things. Homeland Security’s visitor visa tracking system was most recently dinged in a New York Times article. At a hearing, Alan Bersin, DHS assistant secretary for international affairs, told Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) “we don’t know” how many foreigners overstay their visas.  Thus my skepticism about Obama’s promise to update the NICS.

But on second thought, it doesn’t seem like that distant a leap to go from 17 hours a day of operations to 24. A little cloud-hosted backup plan, a few more virtual machine instances and voila. The question is, as operation time increased 50 percent, would the workload rise as much or more from a larger volume of background checks? Or would the system be up longer but also be idle longer or maybe have the same workload spread out over 50 percent more on time. Impossible to say now, but if I were FBI’s tech shop, I’d be doing some serious capacity planning.

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