In Guns We Trust, home

About the film

In Guns We Trust (2026)

Two Australian mates cross America with cameras and one rule: no side, no agenda, just conversations.

Watch free on YouTube Full cast and crew

The story

Josh Janssen and Tommy Jackett love America: the food, the films, the bigger-is-better attitude. The one thing they’ve never understood is the guns. Australia rarely has to think about them, so neither of them has a position. They decide that might be the point.

Over a month on the road in 2024 they meet the people behind the loudest debate in America: a Hollywood armourer, a survivor of the Route 91 Harvest shooting, a man who has used his gun to defend his family, the owner of one of the country’s largest private collections, a Texas sheriff, a former FBI agent, a youth mentor, a school-safety inventor and a trauma surgeon. Each of them gets to speak for themselves.

The deeper they go, the more the question turns back on the two of them: can anyone stay neutral about guns in America?

The journey

  1. Los AngelesCalifornia

    They start where the world learns about guns: Hollywood. Tour guide Sammy Dorian turns a sightseeing run into a story about Iraq. Studio armourer Dutch Merrick teaches them the basics, and the gap between movie guns and real ones. Constitutional scholar Adam Winkler at UCLA asks them what they’re there to do.

  2. Las VegasNevada

    Autumn Bignami, a teacher and mother of three, survived the Route 91 Harvest festival shooting, and they join the sunrise remembrance on its seventh anniversary. In the desert, Mike Sodini, whose family business imported firearms, gives them their first lesson in live fire and explains Walk the Talk America, the mental-health nonprofit he founded.

  3. St GeorgeUtah

    At a gun shop on the Utah–Nevada border, Gina McComb buys her first gun and Raymond Erickson explains why he always carries.

  4. NashvilleTennessee

    Mychael Waller, a father, talks plainly about the times he has had to defend himself and his son. Clay-shooting coach Joseph Calabrace offers another view of what a gun can mean.

  5. Colorado SpringsColorado

    At Dragonman’s, Mel “Dragon Man” Bernstein shows them a collection of thousands of firearms and a military museum, alongside his daughter Melissa Flanell.

  6. WacoTexas

    Sheriff Parnell McNamara of McLennan County shows them his department, and the trip reaches its most exhilarating moment, a hog hunt from a helicopter. Then the two of them stop and ask whether they’re becoming desensitised.

  7. ButlerPennsylvania

    Their feeds have filled with gun content since they arrived. They visit the site of the 2024 rally shooting, and former FBI agent Katherine Schweit puts the fear and the numbers side by side.

  8. CharlotteNorth Carolina

    A break with Josh’s brother James Janssen and his family at Halloween, and a quieter question: what does all this mean for a child growing up here?

  9. AtlantaGeorgia

    At Kids to Kings, mentor Kevin Dixie teaches young men firearm safety as part of growing up, and talks about why he does it.

  10. Pell CityAlabama

    An ammunition vending machine at the grocery store, then Kevin Thomas of KT Security Solutions and the bullet-resistant classroom safe room he built after Uvalde, which he hopes will be obsolete within twenty years.

  11. WashingtonDC

    Trauma surgeon Dr Joseph Sakran of Johns Hopkins describes what he sees in the emergency room. Katherine Schweit sees reasons for hope. And the film ends closer to home than either of them expected.

What the film asks

  • Can you be in the middle?The film’s first question to the people it meets, and the one it keeps asking itself.
  • What does a gun mean?Freedom, protection, a job, a loss. The same object means very different things to the people in the film.
  • Where does the fear come from?The feeling of danger and the numbers don’t always move together, and the film looks at both.
  • What’s the common ground?Safety training, mental health and suicide prevention come up on every side of the argument.
  • Who is it for?Children appear at almost every stop: in drills, at ranges, in classrooms, at home.

In their own words

“Is your goal here to teach people, or is your goal here to hear people?”
Adam Winkler, constitutional scholar
“I’m not gonna be a victim, or my wife, or my grandkids. So everywhere I go, I carry.”
Raymond Erickson, at Rowdy’s Range
“You may be the biggest threat. And that’s why responsible gun ownership is so important.”
Mike Sodini, Walk the Talk America
“People now think that every corner has a murderer.”
Katherine Schweit, former FBI special agent
“This right here needs to be obsolete in 20 years.”
Kevin Thomas, on his classroom safe room
“I just don’t know how productive it is to assume that nothing can change.”
Josh Janssen, director

The facts

Watch
Free on YouTube, worldwide, from Thursday 22 October 2026, 8pm ET (Friday 23 October, 11am AEDT)
Running time
76 minutes
Directed by
Josh Janssen
Featuring
Josh Janssen and Tommy Jackett, with more than thirty people speaking for themselves. Full cast and crew
Made by
2A Film, Full Stack Films and Rethink Films
Filmed
Across the United States and in Melbourne, Australia, in 2024
Content
Includes gunfire and discussion of shootings, suicide and loss. Made for adults and older teenagers watching with support.
Not to be confused with
The 2013 Canadian short documentary, the 2017 American action film or the 2025 book that share the title.