Jackie Calmes: Will 19 dead in California alter the balance between your right to a gun and my right to live?
by Jackie Calmes, Los Angeles Times
Jan 28, 2023
3 minutes
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Individualism has been a defining and admirable American trait throughout this nation's history on a vast, varied continent. But so has its opposite: communitarianism, collectivism — a focus on the common good, even if that means curbing some individuals' liberty.
The two impulses aren't mutually exclusive; they coexist, if in tension. In some periods, one impulse is more prominent than the other. When President Herbert Hoover's reliance on what he called Americans' proved woefully inadequate to the Great Depression, the nation turned to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the greatest burst of collective action ever to that
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