After our story on the Rise of the Prepper, we have been inundated with emails from readers telling us how hard it’s becoming for them to obtain certain types of ammo. We also had a reader send us a press release this morning from Ruger.

Effective Immediately Ruger has stopped accepting Firearms Orders. The Company says that they have had to temporarily suspend the acceptance of new orders after receiving requests for more than one million units.

Here is the Official Statement form Ruger:

SOUTHPORT, CT –Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. (NYSE-RGR), announced today that for the first quarter 2012, the Company has received orders for more than one million units. Therefore, the Company has temporarily suspended the acceptance of new orders. Chief Executive Officer Michael O. Fifer made the following comments: The Company’s Retailer Programs that were offered from January 1, 2012 through February 29, 2012 were very successful and generated significant orders from retailers to independent wholesale distributors for Ruger firearms.

Year-to-date, the independent wholesale distributors placed orders with the Company for more than one million Ruger firearms.

Despite the Company’s continuing successful efforts to increase production rates, the incoming order rate exceeds our capacity to rapidly fulfill these orders. Consequently, the Company has temporarily suspended the acceptance of new orders.

The Company expects to resume the normal acceptance of orders by the end of May 2012.

In the Rise of the Prepper article, we warned that with Guns, Gold, and Emergency Food all setting record sales numbers, it would likely cause major shortages to hit the marketplace. As people begin to stock up on preparedness related items in response to the coming election cycle, we will likely see nationwide shortages similar to what happened during the elections in 2008. I fear this is only the beginning.