When President Obama issued his recent executive order mandating increased background checks on gun buyers, he may well have done so with this knowledge: The National Instant Criminal Background Check System is unable to handle the very increase he wanted.

The effect, then, would be to prevent many people who are perfectly qualified to own guns from getting them. And Obama probably knows it.

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Testifying on Wednesday before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Obama’s gun control actions, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the NICS simply cannot handle the volume of requests for background checks it is currently receiving — even before the new Obama order. She insisted that funding for the administration’s proposed 250 additional employees at the FBI background check center is crucial to accommodating the volume of requests.

“Sadly, the system is overwhelmed at this time,” Lynch told Congress on Wednesday.

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If Lynch believes an additional 250 employees are crucial for the workload NICS has now, what does she expect will occur when the number of background checks explodes even further? What does she think will happen after all those people “engaged in the business” of selling firearms, who previously didn’t run background checks, start running them regularly?

The number of background checks has risen steadily since June, with more checks performed in December than during any month on record, according to the FBI.

“We’ve kind of found ourselves in a perfect storm,” FBI Assistant Director Stephen Morris told USA Today.

Yet that “perfect storm” was well underway when Obama made his teary-eyed defense of executive overreach Jan. 5 in the East Room of the White House.

The FBI is legally required to process background checks within three days. The surge in new background checks in the past six months has been so high that annual leave for over 400 NICS employees has been canceled since before Thanksgiving. In fact, 185,345 checks were run on Black Friday alone. That’s a single-day record.

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Since October, every one of the bureau’s appeal examiners has been reassigned to processing gun purchase background checks. This reassignment and ensuing halt of the appeals process has resulted in a backlog of over 7,000 appeals from citizens who believe they unfairly failed a background check.

But by effectively being denied a fair appeals process, thousands of Americans who potentially and improperly failed the background checks may have had their Second Amendment Rights violated.

Obama’s mandate for increased background checks without any way of actually ensuring increased processing capability within the NICS is either a stunning example of the shortsightedness and inefficiency that’s inherent of big government — or an attempt to limit gun possession and Second Amendment rights.