You know those SWAT teams which bust into people's homes with No-Knock raids, shoot and kill people and then realize that they made a mistake, well they're Americans too. You remember those LA cops shooting 78 rounds at a newspaper delivery woman and her mom during the Dorner manhunt? Why did they shoot? Why was the life of a Police Captain worth so much more than the lives of two old women? Those cops were all Americans too. They placed allegiance to fellow officers and superiors above allegiance to their oath.
There is a problem here and it's that many citizens now believe that Federal employees grant greater allegiance to the Federal Government, their bosses, their coworkers and their paychecks than they place do the nation and its citizens. We've all seen the statistics about how DC is pretty much recession proof - the government keeps growing, its employees continue to do well for themselves, and the rest of the nation suffers. How many employees are going to jump off that gravy train. How many employees are going to abide by Nuremberg Rules, that illegal orders do not have to be followed when they stand to lose their job, their pension, their good name. We see what happens with NSA whistleblowers from the pre-Snowden era.
What went down in Nevada is serious stuff, not because a bunch of yahoos took up a cause, but because a bunch of people have had enough of how powerful and unjust and unaccountable the Federal Government has become and this case was, to them, a good enough symbol of all that is wrong and how they don't trust DC to be working in the interests of the people. This is cut from the same cloth as the OWS protests but instead of focusing on Big Business, this is focused on Government.
These kinds of events are going to increase in the coming years because we're no longer a nation bound together, to each other. These protesters didn't see the Feds as part of them, they saw the Feds as overlords, as foreign rulers. And as for the agents being Americans, look through history and look at the people who were the blunt hammer of the oppressors, it's always people drawn from the population. Who do you think will be the oppressors of Americans, the Guatemalans?