UBCs are not a dead-end. As long as we are basing the firearms record keeping on the structure established by the 1968 Gun Control Act, UBCs are a prerequisite step to firearms registration (which is often a prerequisite step to confiscation and bans).
While it is possible UBCs may be a prerequisite step to confiscations and bans, I do not agree that they are a unidirectional certain step to confiscations and bans. Bans and confiscations could be imposed without any type of registration, it merely take the stroke of a pen on paper. Prior registration would only make it easier but not much easier in a country like the U.S. The UBC can be a step toward a dead-end if other more important fights for the RKBA are won.
I really don’t have much more to say about a national UBC other than the following:
It is very probably inevitable.
Pro-gun people can fight to completely prevent it and lose, or accept the inevitable and work to make it as convenient as possible.
Fighting the UBC in the eyes of the neutrals is not image enhancing for the Pro-gun movement.
Ultimately the fight for the RKBA will be won by “numbers” not battles to continuously stalemate the Anti-gun people. Those “numbers” will consist of more people who want guns, more people who can be convinced they may someday want a gun, and by not scaring the bejezus out of moderates and liberals with flaming rhetoric, hair on fire posturing, and tying support for gun ownership to other politically conservative issues.