I would actually be OK with Universal Background Checks
if I thought I could trust our government. However, given that many, if not most, of the people pushing UBC's talk out both sides of their mouth by saying they respect the Second Amendment to one audience and saying that they favor a complete "turn them all in Mr. and Mrs. America" ban to another audience and that our own government intentionally facilitated the purchase of guns by Mexican Drug Cartels in order to drum up public opinion in favor of gun control, I really don't feel that I can trust our government.
The biggest problem that I see with UBC's is that it's completely unenforceable without registration. The politicians may be saying that they don't support registration now, but wait a few years until the next mass shooting happens (and sooner or later it will if we continue to ignore mental healthcare, NICS reporting, and school security) and they'll be saying that we didn't go far enough with UBC's and that we need to close the "registration loophole" or some other such nonsense.
I, personally, am not worried in the least about selling a gun to a felon because it is my personal policy not to sell a gun to any Tom, Dick, or Harry with cash in hand. I, personally, will only sell a gun to someone I personally know very, very well or to someone who can show me a valid LTCH (License to Carry a Handgun is what we call it in Indiana). I view such as a matter of
personal responsibility and, if history as shown us anything, attempting to legislate personal responsibility typically fails spectacularly.
If the true goal is to ensure that dangerous criminals and the violently mentally ill cannot get a gun, background checks really isn't the best way to go about it because, as you pointed out, there are many ways to get a gun either legally or illegally. Personally, I think that if a person has, through the commission of a crime or extreme mental illness, demonstrated themself to be too dangerous to be trusted with a firearm, that person should not be set free to intermingle with society. If we simply punished crime and treated mental illness appropriately by keeping violent criminals and the dangerously mentally ill locked up, we wouldn't need any background checks to begin with.
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Cho at Va Teach bought his gun from a dealer. Lanza stole his guns from his mom (I know it was mentioned he failed a background check but as I recall he was not even old enough to legally purchase a handgun or AR15 in Conn so a simple license check would be enough). The Aurora shooter bought his guns with a background check.
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I'll add to that that the Columbine shooters acquired their guns illegallly through a straw purchase which UBC's would have done nothing to stop.