The firearms industry has lost over eight days worth of gun sales since December 1998 because the FBI system used to conduct instant background checks has been repeatedly been down.

A report released by the National Association of Federally Licensed Firearms Dealers said the NICS system -- an acronym used to denote the FBI's instant background check database in West Virginia -- has been "shut down" or "out of service" some 84 times in six months.

The outages have amounted to "unacceptable losses of revenue from legitimate businesses," said Alan Korwin, a noted gun law expert and author.

"What other industry would tolerate such dramatic and constant damage to its business?" said Korwin, author of "Gun Laws of America," an unabridged guide of federal gun laws. "The most amazing aspect is the absolute silence from the mainstream media," he said, "where a mere five-hour outage at amazon.com makes national headlines."

The instant checks, which are required by the so-called "Brady II" gun control law, have decreased overall gun sales some 4.45 percent over the period. That, Korwin said, has amounted to an overall loss in profits for legal gun dealers.

Korwin said that at least two full weekend-days, when many gun shows are conducted, have been lost in July alone, bringing the overall total loss to ten days. But, he added, "that does not include outages at the state level, which would account for even more lost time."

He said the NICS system outages do not just hamper gun sales at established firearms businesses. The outages, he pointed out, "also affect sales at gun shows."

Korwin said lawmakers, in anticipation of possible intentional outages of the NICS system perpetrated by the FBI, wrote into the Brady legislation that dealers could sell firearms without subjecting buyers to an instant check if the system were down. However, he said most dealers are not challenging the loophole because they're afraid the government could use bogus charges to revoke their gun licenses altogether.

"Though the law sure seems to protect you, and that language was deliberately placed there during drafting for this very reason, I have little doubt that the Feds would be, shall we say, displeased, at such challenge to their power," Korwin said.

"The fact that (the law) has a penalty for avoiding NICS -- but only if it's running -- might not stop bureaucratic bullying or worse from officials who openly violate other gun laws, such as the ban on recording innocent gun buyers' names," he said.

Korwin added that a number of dealers are "rumbling" about a possible class action lawsuit against the FBI for repetitive outages of the system.

Critics of the NICS system believe the Justice Department may be trying to alter the system's stated purpose of stopping criminals from buying guns to stopping all gun sales.