No, you're right. Background checks won't do the trick. Ban and confiscate assault rifles and mags over 10 rounds. Insist on safety courses and licensing, including a clean mental health evaluation, every five years, for any gun. Clean up the NICS data base so it actually contains the information needed to make an informed decision on a potential buyer's appropriateness for a gun.
Americans are stupid mental cases.
No law, no single provision of a regulation will ever, and has never stopped criminal actions. Speed limits have not eradicated high speed highway accidents. No building codes have ever ended building fires.
But who would argue that speed limits have substantially reduced high speed airomobile accidents? Who would argue that building codes have been totally ineffective in making construction standards higher and therefore safer?
The Gun Culture is retrenching so deeply in the canard that massively popular, common sense gun safety regulations inevitably result in gun confiscation. The 'slippery slope' doctrine.
Those who successfully introduced Prohibition used the same intractable political tact. The most obstinate politics in 20th century American politics. But when faced with overwhelming popular opposition, they held fast until they were utterly smashed. A few compromises would most certainly saved the Prohibition movement.