Alarmed at the potential of the federal government defaulting, ordinary people are flocking to survivalist training schools.

While Washington politicians remain at loggerheads, the government shutdown drags on and the debt ceiling limit approaches, more average people seem to consider a U.S. default, and an ensuing financial catastrophe, increasingly likely.

"Guys that are running these survival schools are seeing an influx in regular people who want to gain these skills. It's really a form of insurance," E.J. "Skull Crusher" Snyder told CNBC.

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"If you think of it in the worst terms, a whole collapse of the government and the normal things in life that we take for granted, what are you prepared to do?" Snyder asked. "People who are used to foraging, or hunting, or trapping, or purifying water are going to move higher up the food chain."

Demand for survivalist products is also booming.

For instance, MRE Star, which makes meals ready to eat, or MREs, has seen its business jump. Instead of ordering a single case of 12 meals, people are making larger orders, asking for four to 10 cases, company operations manager Ken Lester told CNBC.

"Orders were fairly steady from January to three weeks ago. But the orders in September were double any month from January to August," he noted.

"People are looking to control what they can control, and that would be survival, and being able to feed their families."

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has said that if Congress doesn't raise the debt limit this month, the government will default, possibly with catastrophic results.

"Fear mongering? I doubt it," wrote "PJ," a contributor to the blog Prepper-Resources.com, in response to a Fox News story, implying that Lew was fear mongering. "I'm not sure going down the road of default would bring about much of anything that resembles a positive experience.

The next few weeks will be interesting, I'm not sure if we will be able to plow on with the status quo after all of this. Or will we?"

Survivalist Mac Slavo, writing on the SHTFplan.com website, warned, "The end result is going to be widespread financial and economy destruction, a meltdown of the U.S. dollar and a collapse of our very way of life as tens of millions of Americans will be instantly impoverished."

Slavo recommends storing food, saving gold and silver to use as barter and keeping a firearm for defense for "when the masses start fighting for whatever resources remain."

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