• Richard Martinez condemns 'rudderless idiots' in government • Student Christopher Michaels-Martinez one of six killed • Facebook removes page glorifying killer • Opinion: further proof that misogyny kills

The father of one of the six college students killed in California on Friday has repeated his call for stricter gun laws and condemned the US government and powerful gun lobby for failing to enact change.

"We're all proud to be Americans,” Richard Martinez said. “But what kind of message does it send to the world when we have such a rudderless bunch of idiots in government?"



Police named Elliot Rodger, 22, as the suspect in the killing of six University of California, Santa Barbara students in the beachside community of Isla Vista. Rodger, who also died in the incident, is suspected of injuring 13 others, eight of whom sustained gunshot wounds and four of whom were hit by his car.



Martinez, the father of Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, 20, of Los Osos, California, has condemned the National Rifle Association and lax US gun laws multiple times since the incident.

On Monday, he told HLN his son died at an Isla Vista delicatessen because of Congress’s failure to pass substantial gun legislation in the wake of mass shootings including the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook elementary in Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adults were killed.

“Have we learned nothing?” Martinez asked. “These things are going to continue until somebody does something, so where the hell is the leadership?

“My kid died because nobody responded to what occurred at Sandy Hook. Those parents lost little kids. It’s bad enough that I lost my 20-year-old, but I had 20 years with my son. That’s all I’ll ever have but those people lost their children at six and seven years old.

“How do you think they feel? Who’s talking to them now? Who’s doing anything for them now?”



Police removed three semi-automatic handguns and more than 400 rounds of ammunition from the black BMW in which they found Rodger, with what is believed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He had purchased all the weapons legally in California, the state considered to have the strongest gun laws in the country, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.



Rodger posted a number of threatening YouTube videos and detailed the reasons for the killings in a 141-page manifesto which he sent to people including his parents and therapist just before he began the killings. The document explained why he had planned the attack.

“The Day of Retribution is mainly my war against women for rejecting me and depriving me of sex and love,” he wrote.



His mother called the police before she and her husband drove separately to Isla Vista from Los Angeles, a family friend told the New York Times. The six victims were dead by the time they arrived.

Three men were found dead of multiple stab wounds in Rodger’s apartment, including his two room-mates: Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, and George Chen, 19, both of San Jose, California. Weihan Wang, 20, of Fremont, was also found dead in the apartment.

After killing the three men, police said, Rodgers drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house. Having failed to gain entry, he shot Katherine Breann Cooper, 22, of Chino Hills, California and Veronika Elizabeth Weiss, 19, of Westlake Village.

The Santa Barbara county sheriff’s office said it had contact with Rodger three times. On Sunday, Sheriff Bill Brown said failures in the mental-healthcare system prevented an intervention.

“I think the fact of the matter is, there’s a general lack of resources in community mental-health treatment generally,” he told CNN. “There’s also probably a lack of notification by healthcare professionals in instances when people are expressing suicidal or in certain cases homicidal thoughts or tendencies.”



Rodger had been in and out of therapy since the age of nine, but there is no evidence that he had received a diagnosis of a severe mental illness. Even if he had, that would not have been enough to stop him from buying a gun.

On Saturday a lawyer for Rodger's father said the suspect had received a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thousands of people gathered at a park for a candle-light vigil for those killed in Isla Vista on Friday. Photograph: Michael Nelson/EPA

Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said on Sunday that he wanted to bring back gun-control legislation that was proposed after Sandy Hook but which fell in the Senate.



"Obviously, not every kind of gun violence is going to be prevented by laws out of Washington," Blumenthal told CBS. "But at least we can make a start.

“I am going to urge that we bring back those bills, maybe reconfigure them, center on mental health, which is a point where we can agree that we need more resources to make the country healthier and to make sure that these kinds of horrific, insane, mad occurrences are stopped.”

