You might be right, but I think the Beast on the Potomac would cast this as an dangerous armed uprising and bring in UN troops if only as stage props. The globalists within and without this system would see this as the opportunity to be done once and for all with Americans and their anarchic love of personal liberty. Atrocities would be staged and blamed on the “rebels” and likewise run though the mass media.
All persons and all liberties are expendable to the Statist. There is nothing they would not do, and no one they would not kill, in order to perpetuate their false god, be it Eternal Rome, the Thousand Year Reich, or whatever name you wish to apply to the degenerate and oppressive State.
So you're assuming that it's one lone guy or a few protestors against federal tanks? What if the first pictures are of armed mobs in the streets killing each other, or militia or paramilitary groups seizing federal buildings or stringing up dissenters?
Besides assuming that the federal government would be the ones to initiate the use of force, you may also be assuming that the military hasn't learned anything in 50 or 150 years -- that they'd go in with tanks against protestors or mobs, rather than use other tactics and technologies.
Bodies in the streets work both ways. Modern day rebels would have to kill people to get the news media to pay attention to their pitifully small numbers and deluded goals.
That was why the rebels of 1861 fired on US forces in Ft Sumter performing their duty. The rebels fired from stolen US forts, with stolen US cannon. And their illegal acts galvanized the US to resist them.