In some ways the Dickey Amendment empowered them to push the false narrative of a strong relationship between guns and crime. Rather than having to put forward quality studies for their political purposes, they could just handwave at the legislation like it was a foregone conclusion.
Yea, but the problem was Clinton used them as a weapon and it was pretty clear that administrations couldn't trusted to not do that again.
It wasn't perfect, but you're talking millions of dollars that went into the 92/93/94 push. That's hard to come up with for narrative building when it's not tax payer money. Just look at the single source of gun control in the USA today, Michael Bloomberg, if he wasn't personally bankrolling it, things would look a lot different.
