How did this grad student buy all these weapons- with what money?

[Chan790]

19. I dunno, some thoughts:

1. Ph.D candidate in a hard science, not only were they probably not charging him tuition but probably paying him on stipend to attend school. Not at-all uncommon in the sciences, the research work a competent Ph.D candidate can do generates far more income for a university than tuition would.
2. How expensive do you think these guns are? The rifle was the only one likely to have cost much. Shotguns, by comparison, are cheap. Handguns can run the gamut but he bought on the low end in terms of price and power.
3. If you know where to look for information, even the average kitchen chemist can make rudimentary explosives sufficient to booby-trap the apartment for less than $100.* (By the time I was 13, I knew how to make napalm and thermite, before I was out of HS I had the knowledge to make things analogous to Semtex and used to blow-up junk cars in the national forest.)
   
   *-The cheapest and biggest boom is diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Such a bomb took down the Murrah building in OKC and in today's dollars would cost about $490 for components. For his purposes, he'd need a bomb about 1/12 the size to demolish his 3-floor apartment building to rubble.