'Dumping' will not work with Bitcoin because the value of the Bitcoins has a minimum it will retain for those who use bitcoins, as in the first crash that saw Bitcoin drop to $5 and hold. Part of the problem is that to drive the price up, people must sell their bitcoins, and it is these same people who make money on the way up that will buy the bitcoins when they fall back to some lower value. Yes, casual investors will flea the market, but the market will not go away. It will remain continue to grow, albeit at a somewhat slower rate than before the dumping.
Banning running very small software that sends tiny packets would require a level of policing that crumble under its own weight due to the enormous manpower requirements to enforce it. Even if the process of monitoring can be identified, the cost of prosecution is something else entirely. Sure, they could do some high profile cases, but that would be a like a teardrop in a bucket. They don't actually lock up drug addicts and rarely even prosecute for this very reason - there are just too many of them. Rewards for someone's using Bitcoin would just add to the cost and ISPs cannot track encrypted communications.
As far as disarming the population, it is currently hard to get ammo not on backorder, and while the government certainly has some serious firepower, it is still trite compared with the size of the armed population of the United States, so going to war against the U.S. citizens would fail at this level alone, not to mention that it would likely work to increase adoption of Bitcoin as freedom fighters would need something transact with their vendors.
Thankfully, the media has nowhere near the influence it once had. For varying reasons, only a very small percentage of people give any care about what the media claiming, so this strategy would also fail to have any substantial effect on public opinion.