I take it that you have never had someone shoot at you with the sincere intent of killing you. I have and when I fired back I was damn glad that I had an M-14 because I had zero intention of providing Intel with a better intelligence source if and when the sob was ever captured. I did feel good about supplying Intel with an almost complete corpse to photograph, measure, weigh, strip naked or do whatever else they do with enemy corpses.
Dead enemies are not just dead. They can be permanently scratched off the list of deadly threats. That’s a good feeling.
Not with little hand-held guns.