Ask anyone here who went to charm school at Parris Island, San Diego or Quantico and they'll tell you: the Marine Corps as an institution is [b]VERY[/b] resistant to change, political or otherwise. There is a professional core of officers and Staff NCOs who are in it until retirement. They pass on the core values and "corporate culture," for lack of a better term, to one-termers like me. They are also the institutional memory of the Corps, having been trained by the cadre of professionals from the generation before them. The Marine Corps honors, respects and damn near deifies the men who came before us, the "Old Corps," far too much to dishonor them by dishonoring our Corps.
I don't know what else I can tell you to reassure you on this point. The Marine Corps is [b]part[/b] of the "gun culture" of America. Too many of us learned to love the crack of rifle fire going downrange and the smell of cordite while wearing an Eagle, Globe and Anchor on our chest to ever take part in its destruction or stand by and allow it to be destroyed.