The gunman responsible for Friday's horrific Santa Barbara killings was yesterday confirmed as UK-born college student Elliot Rodger, son of Peter Rodger, the assistant director of The Hunger Games films. The 22 year-old drove around the Isla Vista campus of the University of California in a BMW, killing three people seemingly at random, in a bid to exact revenge upon the girls in the student town who he felt rejected him. He eventually crashed into a tree and shot himself, and it's emerged that he also stabbed three men to death in his apartment before embarking upon the drive-by shootings.
Last night three bodies were removed from his apartment after he was named as the killer.
Before shooting his fellow students, Elliot - who, according to reports, has Asperger's Syndrome, uploaded a video to YouTube detailing exactly what he was going to do with pretty chilling exactness:
"On the day of retribution, I am going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB [UC Santa Barbara]. And I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck up blonde slut I see inside there. All those girls I have desired so much, they will have all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them. While they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes. I will take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male."
A virgin, Elliot seemingly blamed the girls he studied with for his lack of sexual experience, describing in the video how "It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it" as well as describing himself as "the perfect guy".
While it was still unclear as to who was behind the killings, Elliot's father, Peter Rodger, who is the assistant director of the Hunger Games, came forward yesterday, making a statement that he believed his son was responsible. This, of course, turned the story into an instant media frenzy provoking a large amount of inappropriate Hunger Games references and baffling calls to re-examine the film's theme of teen-on-teen violence.
Somehow, we're not entirely sure that the dystopian fantasy series has anything to do with the actions of the clearly disturbed 20-something; Elliot showed signs of intense loneliness on his social media pages, and his attitude towards violence is wholly different to that of the world-famous trilogy.
The more important issue is, surely, the fact that he was able to legally purchase three semi-automatic handguns. Especially considering he had already had some run-ins with the law: in July last year, he reported an alleged assault, but it was suspected that it might have been the other way around, with the aggressor in fact being the victim, and earlier this year he made a citizen’s arrest of a roommate who he claimed had stolen three candles from him.
Bill Brown, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff, said they'd found a 141-page diary/autobiography written by Elliot which apparently made 'very clear how disturbed Mr Rodger was', and he'd been receiving medical attention at the time, too: 'The fact that he had been and was continuing to be seen by a number of healthcare professionals makes it very, very apparent that he was very mentally disturbed when he made that document.'
And yet he was able to purchase two Sig Sauer P226s and a Glock 34 Long Slide plus over 400 rounds of ammunition. The father of one of the victims said, in light of the murder of his 20 year-old son Christopher Ross Michael-Martinez: 'They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, "Stop this madness, we don’t have to live like this." Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: Not one more.'
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.