Agreement On Watered-Down Senate Gun Bill

The picture above is of one of the memorials erected after the Newtown shooting massacre. I show it here again just to remind everyone what the gun bill pending in the Senate is really about. It has nothing to do with confiscating any guns, creating a gun registry, or abridging the Second Amendment. It is simply an effort to keep guns out of the hands of those who should not have them (as much as possible), criminals or the dangerously mentally ill -- in the hopes of preventing the kind of mass shootings that happened in Connecticut, Colorado, Arizona, Virginia, and many other states.
And it looks like there is now a little bit better chance that a gun bill could actually be passed by Congress. A couple of senators (Manchin and Toomey) have reached an agreement on the background checks part of the pending Senate bill. And they think that a majority of the Senate could accept this compromise, including at least enough Republicans to get it passed. The agreement is in the form of an amendment which will water down the background checks a bit. It will rehire background checks on gun sales, including all internet and gun show sales, but it excludes the sale of a gun by a private citizen (not using the internet or at a gun show).
Personally, I think this still leaves too big a loophole to avoid a background check when buying a gun. All a criminal or dangerously deranged person needs to do is check the newspaper classifieds and go buy their weapon from a private person (many of which could care less who's buying their gun as long as they get what they want for it). But it may be the only thing that could get through Congress this year.
This is what passes for compromise these days though. Congress thinks that doing a little toward solving a problem is better than nothing. For me, it is just another instance of putting a band-aid on a problem that needs much more serious care (just like was done with health care reform -- where they put some patches on a broken system, instead of throwing it out and going to a single-payer system that would not only cover everyone, but do so at a cheaper price).
That's my opinion. What's yours? Is the watered-down gun bill a good bill -- or just the only thing that could squeak through Congress this year?
NOTE -- The NRA has come out in opposition to the watered-down Senate gun bill. But that is to be expected. They don't really represent gun owners anymore. They simply shill for the gun manufacturers these days, and those gun makers don't want any kind of law that might reduce the number of guns they could sell -- regardless of who is buying those guns.