New details have emerged about the mental health record of John Zawahri, the gunman who killed five and wounded several others in Santa Monica last week, raising questions about how he was able to obtain the arsenal of military-style weapons used in the massacre. The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified school district confirmed Wednesday that Zawahri was removed from his continuation high school for posing a threat of violence to other students.

Zawahri originally attended Santa Monica High School, but was sent to Olympic High, a school for kids with academic or disciplinary issues. At Olympic, it was common knowledge among the students that Zawahri often browsed for assault weapons online. Family friends said he “had a fascination with guns.” In 2006, one student told an English teacher that Zawahri had invited him to his house, showed him his samurai sword and listed students he wanted to hurt. The teacher reported it to the principal, and soon law enforcement got involved. Police searched his house, but it is not clear if they found any weapons. Zawahri was also apparently watching YouTube videos on how to make pipe bombs and other explosives.

The teenager was removed from school and hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. He was released not long after, surprising many teachers.

Despite this record, Zawahri was somehow able to obtain a semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifle, 40 high-capacity magazines, and at least 1,300 rounds of ammunition. After a person is institutionalized for a psychiatric exam, they are banned from possessing firearms for five years — which would have let Zawahri get weapons after 2011.

Police are still tracing Zawahri’s weapons to try to determine how exactly he was able to stockpile so much ammo. One gun, a black powder handgun, is thought to be a “curio or relic type” of weapon that may have been in the family for years. The AR-15 assault rifle may have been banned for sale under California law.

Mental health has been a central issue of the gun debate, after multiple mass shooters showed warning signs of violence and instability yet were still able to get guns and wreak havoc. After Seung-Hui Choi, who had been declared a danger to himself or others, killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, Congress passed a law meant to improve reporting of people who had been involuntarily committed for background checks. However, the National Rifle Association managed to insert provisions that actually made it easier for people with mental illness records to get their gun rights restored.

Yet even if the background check system had been effective in stopping institutionalized violent individuals from buying guns from federally licensed dealers, Zawahri could have dodged a background check by buying his arsenal online or at a gun show without detection.

Five are dead after a gunman rampaged through Santa Monica, CA, on Friday, ending at the local community college. The Santa Monica shooting marks the tenth mass shooting on a school campus in California since 1976.

The suspect, 23-year-old John Zawahri, was known as an angry young man with a “fascination with guns” that worried family friends. Zawahri was born in Lebanon but has lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years. In a press conference on Sunday, police said the troubled young man had planned out the attack and likely hoped to kill hundreds. The spree lasted 10 minutes, ending when police shot and killed Zawahri on the scene.

Zawahri allegedly killed his father and brother and burned down their house before heading toward Santa Monica College, armed with a ballistic vest, an AR-15 assault rifle and a duffel bag filled with an estimated 1,300 rounds of ammunition, magazines, and a .44 revolver. He shot and wounded a woman driving by his house, then carjacked another woman. On the way, he shot at pedestrians and a city bus, injuring 3 people.

Once he arrived at the community college, Zawahri gunned down a groundskeeper, 68-year-old Navarro Franco, killing him immediately, and his 26-year-old daughter, Marcela, who died in the hospital on Sunday. Witnesses say students scattered, jumping out windows and running for their lives. He then shot an unidentified woman in her 50s outside the library, went inside and fired 70 rounds at students who had been studying for exams. Police ultimately shot and killed him in the library.

Zawahri had a run-in with the law in 2006, but police could not give more details as he was a juvenile at the time. A law enforcement source told CNN that Zawahri had been hospitalized for mental issues after talking about wanting to hurt someone.

It is not clear where Zawahri got a hold of his AR-15 — the same weapon used in the Aurora theater shooting and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre last year. Technically, certain AR-15 rifles are prohibited in California, but critics have said the law is rendered essentially toothless by loopholes and legal challenges. In May, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a new law to give law enforcement more funding to crack down on illegal assault weapons owned by convicted criminals and people with serious mental illnesses.

Many have already expressed shock that such violence could occur in a sleepy, affluent town like Santa Monica. But similar towns in southern California have suffered through random mass shootings in recent years. A 20-year-old man went on a shooting spree across suburban Orange County just a few months ago, killing four. Eight died in a hair salon shooting in Seal Beach, CA, three years ago. And in 2005, four others were killed in a rampage in the small town of Thousand Oaks, not far from Santa Monica.

Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December, more people have been killed by guns than the total number of American troops killed in the Iraq War. Though Congress failed to pass an enormously popular proposal to expand background checks in April, the Center for American Progress has identified several ways federal enforcers can crack down on illegal gun sales and stop shootings before they happen.

A piece posted to the Tea Party Nation website yesterday, and sent to the group’s members in an email from TPN head Judson Phillips, blamed the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut on teachers, unions, bureaucracy, and the presence of sex in popular culture. In a lengthy screed that’s essentially a round-up of every major cultural and policy grievance the American right holds with the rest of the country, author Timothy Birdnow cited concerns about the mental health of shooter Adam Lanza, the lack of spanking in schools, and the new movie “Django Unchained” — among other things — as evidence that American popular culture “has made murder, rape, mayhem, hatred, and violence ‘cool.’”

He then went on to recommend a number of interesting solutions, including a lamentation that George Zimmerman was not guarding Sandy Hook Elementary School:

Homeschool. Take away the power of the radicals in the classrooms. Makes your kids safer, too.

Back Right to Work legislation for the public sector. Teacher’s unions have helped cement much of this in place. As long as we have group think in the classrooms we will never see the end of this. […]

Work to devolve power back to the parents, the local officials, and the communities. A society that is top-down will inevitably lead to alienation of the sort we have seen here. This young man was twenty years old, and his actions were neither spurious nor random. As an FBI profiler said on television last night, he undoubtedly felt powerless and sought to remedy that. Why does a twenty year old feel powerless? He could leave his mother’s home at any time at his age. He feels powerless because he has lived in an over-bureaucratized society, one run ultimately from a far-away central location. […]

Restrict the sex in movies, television, on the internet. There is a reason why young people commit these sorts of crimes, and sex plays no small part. Their passions are eternally inflamed, and they wander the Earth with no outlet for their overstimulated glands. […]

Support the creation of local organizations to act as “neighborhood watch” for schools. Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive. Perhaps it’s time we start asking for volunteers to protect our children. It will require security checks, but isn’t that worth it? This dovetails with the union problem; the unions will fight this measure tooth-and-nail.

This isn’t the first time Tea Party Nation has indulged in extremist outbursts. Members of the group chanted “pay for it yourself,” suggesting the uninsured should finance their own health care out of pocket, at protests during the Supreme Court hearings on Obamacare. In 2011, TPN emailed a message urging businesses to “not hire a single person” in protest against Obama’s presidency. And Phillips also responded to the controversy over Mitt Romney’s tax returns by suggesting Republicans inquire whether President Obama is a drug addict.