When news broke of the Margory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on Valentine’s Day 2008, students and faculty at the small liberal arts college where I taught at the time were catapulted out of the pastoral slumber and relative safety of our tiny rural campus and into the morass of public and political discourse on gun rights and regulation, asking questions like “Could that happen here?,” “Why doesn’t anyone do anything about this?,” and “What can I do about this?” In short, it was a prime opportunity not only for learning but also for teaching forward to important action. Too bad the course schedule for the next year was already set.
