Respectfully, I think you should look carefully at the kinds gun regulations that are being proposed today. People are confused as to why the NRA would oppose background checks on all firearms transfers without understanding that all proposals put forth to date would create firearms registries, which have been abused in the past. If you came up to a solution to that (and didn't add a new tax on firearms transfers), you might actually get the NRA's support. Additionally, some state "universal background check" measures have done ridiculous things like make it illegal to lend a firearm to someone at a shooting range.
1) You apply for a background check; there will be a fee to cover costs.
2) Assuming you pass the background check, you are issued an ID
3) Any gun sale would require you to present the ID. This includes in-state private-party transfers. The seller keeps (but does not register centrally) a record of this (e.g. a photocopy)
Note an unexpired id from #2 is not required for possessing a firearm, merely for acquiring one, and having been issued an ID at some point in the past is not proof that you have any firearms (as you may have never purchased one at all, or you may have sold all the ones you purchased).
While not perfect, it is a better system than the current system, and lets you audit people suspected of selling firearms inappropriately. Individual firearms are not registered, nor is it possible for the government to generate a list of definite gun owners (though eventually it would be possible for the government to generate a list of definite non-gun owners once everyone who owned a gun before the law was in effect is dead).
• An ID card does not guarantee that the bearer has not subsequently been deemed mentally incompetent nor convicted of a crime that disqualifies them from firearms ownership.
• Your proposal would require anyone who has ever sold a gun to maintain records of the transfer indefinitely. In order to have teeth, you'd have to create a new crime for failure to do so. Even federally licensed firearms dealers don't have to maintain records indefinitely.
All this aside, there is the larger issue that the kinds of events that prompt such proposals (Sandy Hook, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, Charleston) have perpetuators who either passed NCIC or would have if they went through a dealer. And while mass shootings are what get all the news coverage, they are hardly representative of the average shooting, where the guns tend to have been acquired illegally already.
[1]: http://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gun...
It seems to me that the NRA positions itself to the
government as a representative of all gun owners.
Blaming existing law and the NRA after a highly-reported shooting is common, even when the gun was obtained illegally and the shooter not legally eligible to own one. An analog would be blaming Planned Parenthood when a newborn is abandoned to die.