Despite the familiar American scene of lined-up students being ushered out of school buildings while their classmates lay wounded or dead inside, and despite repeated calls for restrictions on the guns used in such shootings, nearly twenty years after Columbine, the gun lobby retains a powerful grip on the nation's politicians - using money and political pressure to maintain the status quo. After Parkland, however, a unique revolution unfolded. Led by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, adolescents challenged the powerful gun lobby and special interest groups through their advocacy for new legislation related to gun ownership. This article examines ways three students from Parkland, Florida, who survived the massacre, used their experiences as witnesses to gun violence in their school community to write their way into our nation's consciousness and how English teachers can bring their writing into the classroom. Through the authors' examinations of these texts, they show "English Journal" readers how to examine the rhetorical possibilities that exist within present-day persuasive texts and how these texts could be used to teach about persuasive writing. Teachers have the potential to add a relevant tool of citizenship, scholarship, and productive resistance. Teachers can draw from texts that offer a pedagogy of persuasion that invites students to use language to help shape a better world.