Mr. Rodger purchased the first gun in November 2012 for $700, a Glock 34 semiautomatic pistol at Goleta Valley Gun and Supply, just a few miles from his apartment, using money he had gotten from family members meant to pay for his college classes.
“I did this quickly and hastily,” he said in the manifesto of the gun purchase, which he called
“My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger.” He added that he had chosen that particular gun because it was an “efficient and highly accurate weapon.”
After picking it up a few weeks later, he said, he “felt a new sense of power.”
“Who’s the alpha male now?” he added. He said he then had locked the pistol in his safe before going on vacation with his mother in England.
Mr. Rodger wrote that he had bought a second handgun in the spring of 2013, a Sig Sauer P226. “It is of a much higher quality than the Glock and a lot more efficient,” he wrote. He paid $1,100 for the gun, $400 more than he had paid for his first gun.
“These prices were of no concern to me,” he wrote, because he had more than $5,000 in his bank account meant to fund what he called his “Day of Retribution.”
At the start of this year, Mr. Rodger said, he decided to buy a third gun in case one of his other two jammed. “I needed two working handguns at the same time, as that was how I planned to commit suicide, with two simultaneous shots to the head,” he said.
The guns – two Sig Sauer p226 model handguns and a Glock 34 – were legally purchased from federally licensed dealers and were registered to Elliot Rodger, according to Bill Brown of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department.
Authorities also recovered 34 loaded 10-round magazines for the Sig Sauers and seven 10-round magazines for the Glock, Brown said at a news conference Saturday evening.
