I do not think that he was against regulation, and keep in mind that criminals inherently do not care about gun laws or regulation.
The definition of a criminal is somebody who breaks the law, which means anyone who breaks any law is disregarding the existence of a law. This is not unique to gun legislation.
If your bar for whether or not we should have laws and restrictions is whether or not people will break them, then I don’t really know how you can square that with the necessary existence of our judicial system.
Let’s look at this another way: despite DUI laws, there are people still drinking and driving every day. Should we remove the restriction and just allow drinking and driving?