Sean Penn is a tool, but he’s been getting good press lately for his work with CORE, and his work getting more people vaccinated. Penn recently refused to go to work on Showtime’s Gaslit until everyone (crew and cast) was vaccinated. He also backed across the board vaccine mandates. Penn is currently promoting Flag Day, which he directed and stars in, and he keeps talking about vaccines and how everyone should get them.

Actor Sean Penn once again came out strongly against unvaccinated people, likening their insistance on free choice to a Second Amendment advocate pointing a gun in your face.

Speaking to CNN host Michael Smerconish, Penn – who previously refused to have unvaccinated people on the set of his Watergate series Gaslit — said that while he has “some areas of strong belief in the Second Amendment,” he can’t support those who use the Constitution to justify what he perceives as dangerous actions.

“It’s, you know, I have some areas of strong belief in the Second Amendment,” Penn said “But I think that you need to recognize how, you know, with something like this, you can’t go around pointing a gun in somebody’s face, which is what it is when people are unvaccinated.”

Penn said there were only two categories of people who are resisting being vaccinated.

“There are those that, once the FDA gives full approval, will go forward with it. And that there are those who have become entrenched in a kind of radical libertarianism and an identity of politic that has sort of perversely turned this issue into something that forgets that in the United States of America, our entire history, it’s all based on being independent because we understand interdependency. The entire history of successful things in this country.”

He continued, “And if we’re going to continue with successful things, if we’re going to take some of the great lessons that have been learned in the last year, some of the – some of the extraordinary movements, you know, look George Floyd, all of what’s happening societal. If we’re going to take the good parts of that and move it forward we’re going to do it interdependently and I think vaccination is the beginning of that given that it’s such a threat now to business, to life style, to life here and around the world.”

[From Deadline]

I wonder what the VENN Diagram looks like of “anti-Vaxxers” and “gun nuts” and whether there’s an overlap for “gun nuts open to Sean Penn’s persuasion on vaccines.” I do think Penn was trying to talk to people at their level, or at least what he thinks is their level. “It’s like guns, you know… like, getting a vaccine is that feeling of holstering a very big, loaded gun.” Next he’s going to say that states should give out free guns to people getting vaccinated. But he does have a point about how “American individualism” has gotten us to this point where millions of people completely f–king refuse to do something basic for the good of society, for the good of their family, for the good of their community.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.