We who float upon the churning seas of ideology will no doubt someday steer our rudders into the safe harbors of Reality, lest the storms of oppression wreak havoc upon our forecastles and shaft alleys. The flotsom of our ideas will live on long after the ship of state has been scuttled into the ocean of despair.
(Even local law enforcement agencies have restrained themselves from such operations. In Texas, a county sheriff has not attempted a siege or assault of a farm inhabited by survivalists even though one of their number assaulted a state trooper and the local office of Child Protective Services has questioned their parenting practices.)
From a Constitutional standpoint, this is a positive development. The Second Amendment clearly guarantees the individual citizens' right to keep and bear arms. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments clearly prohibit the Federal government from encroaching upon the powers and rights of the states and the people. Federal firearms regulations, other than on properties used legitimately by the Federal government (e.g., military bases), flout the letter of the Constitution and the intent of its framers. The sole basis of these regulations is the notorious "interstate commerce" clause, which was originally intended to prevent the states from establishing quotas and tariffs.
That the Feds have not tried any more large scale raids had nothing to do with better Constitutional exegesis, but with public revulsion at the Branch Davidian fiasco. Keep in mind that since the assassination of President Kennedy, a significant minority of the public is almost automatically skeptical of the official line on events. Sometimes, the skepticism becomes the majority position. Even at the height of the dominance of the mainstream media, the 1970s, when almost all prominent public voices were liberal and dutifully parroted the "Oswald acted alone" mantra, a majority of Americans came to dispute the Warren Commission version of the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963. With the advent of nationally syndicated talk radio in the early 1990s, the rise of the Internet as an alternative news source in the late 1990s, and the development of cable and satellite television fragmenting the once mass market for mainstream TV news, the old top-down "command and control" model of the mass media disseminating politically correct information to the public became increasingly ineffective.
Public revulsion was mainly focused on the Clinton Administration, whose first two years in office were marred not only by the Branch Davidian massacre, but by the widely unpopular national health care plan, the mysterious death of Vince Foster, and the generally high handed way a Democrat administration tilted toward the Ivy League and other liberal universities dealt with public issues. This revulsion resulted in a massive GOP victory in the Congressional elections of 1994, the largest shift from the Democrats to the Republicans since 1946. While during the 1990s, many Clinton associates died under mysterious circumstances, the only other high profile Federal assault during the Clinton Administration against the general public involved the 2000 kidnaping of Elian Gonzales from Miami to return him to Cuba. The ongoing anger in the Cuban-American community may well have cost Al Gore Florida's electoral votes and thus the Presidency.
At the cost of over 70 lives, the destruction of the Branch Davidians may have at least temporarily restrained the iron boot of the Leviathan State.