dogtown tom: "Sorry, As funny as that may seem I've got to call BS on this. And I'm not exactly sure what a "certain well-placed rumor" is. Do you mean a rumor started by someone who is in a position of authority with the FBI or ATF?"
No, what I meant was that, whether fact-based or not, the story was a rumor, placed well by a political operative seeking to discredit NICS during the period mentioned above, about a decade ago when the system was plagued by outages and seemed vulnerable to political attack, during a time when enhanced gun control or other changes seemed possible -- days of the so-called "Million Mom March", the Second Amendment Sisters and all that. No way to prove or disprove that rumor all these years later; supposedly it was based at least in part on fact. It would be a mere footnote to the gun politics of that era, but for the fact that I happen to find it not merely plausible but also hilariously funny.