SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
All too often, we share news of horrible violence on this show, and this next story is not that. It does start with that, though, so just stay with me.
Last Sunday, of course, hundreds of worshippers with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were gathered for a service in Michigan when a man rammed his truck through the chapel doors, began firing and set the building ablaze. Four people died before he was killed in a shootout with the police.
In the aftermath, as they often do, people set up online fundraisers for the victims' families. David Butler found himself thinking, they're not the only victims. Butler lives in Utah and is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints himself, and he created a fundraiser for the family of the shooter. It's gone on to raise over $300,000 at the time of this taping. Dave Butler joins me now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
DAVE BUTLER: Hey. Thanks very much for having me, Scott.
DETROW: Why did you decide to do this?
BUTLER: I saw somebody else's tweet suggesting it was a good idea. And that seemed obviously correct to me, and nobody else had done it, so I stepped up.
DETROW: You say obviously correct, but I don't know if everybody would think that.
BUTLER: Well, I think maybe there's a blind spot here. Thomas Sanford committed a horrible crime, during the course of which he was killed.
DETROW: Yeah.
BUTLER: He left behind a widow and a 10-year-old son. The boy has congenital hyperinsulinism and is obviously innocent. So I want to push back a little on your suggestion that it's not obvious and provide an alternative interpretation.
DETROW: Yeah.
BUTLER: I think that I happened to be the guy that set up this GiveSendGo, but I think that if I hadn't done it, somebody else would have done it.
DETROW: You had a post on that page that jumped out to me. I've been standing in a hurricane of love and generosity for three days now. Can you tell me more about that thinking?
BUTLER: Yeah. Sorry. It's a little emotional. I - look, I told my wife Tuesday morning, I said, hey, listen, I think we'll raise a few thousand bucks, and that'll be it. And we raised $100,000 by the 12-hour mark. And if you go and look at the GiveSendGo, there are some 8,500 - in fact, 8,501 as of right now - contributions. The average is 40 bucks. And while they're doing this, they're posting messages of love and hope and acceptance. It's been incredible.
DETROW: You know, it's interesting. Money is a limited thing. It's a zero-sum thing. But empathy is not. And yet, I think a lot of times we think about it as a limited thing - that it's hard to have empathy for people on all sides of a situation when, like you're saying, that's not the case. It is very possible.
BUTLER: It is very possible. I also think that just a moment's thought - man, the 10-year-old son is not on the other side. He did not fill up a gas can for his dad and say, go get the Mormons, right? That did not happen. That guy - he's not an aggressor. Nobody needs to forgive him. We need to love him. We need to help that kid.
DETROW: You know, you're touching on something. As we were thinking about this story together, we had kind of had an editorial conversation. Is this a conversation about forgiveness? Is this a conversation about empathies? Is this a conversation about love? It seems like you've thought about that as well because, like you said, this isn't about the shooter specifically.
BUTLER: It isn't. I think people - if you read down the messages, I think that some people are experiencing having a forgiveness event, and especially sort of if you think about this maybe from an LDS perspective. I am going to forgive him. We are going to forgive him. And the concrete thing we're going to do to show our forgiveness is we're going to love his family, right? And maybe that's the way to think about the sort of - the Mormon story here.
There is another story, which is not everybody who has contributed is LDS. And I know that there are mainline Christians, and I know that there are Jews, and I know that there are atheists who are contributing to support the family, right? And they may each have different reasons, and it may not be forgiveness. It may be something more like empathy, compassion, love, help. And I think the sort of - the overall story that unites both those stories (ph) is, hey, look, there are divisions among us. But I think this is a moment where many thousands of people are finding they can come together to help somebody in need and just completely set aside those divisions.
DETROW: Well, Dave Butler, thanks for doing this, and thanks for talking to us about it.
BUTLER: Scott, thanks for having me on. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
