Essentially zero handguns produce the kind of energy downrange that an AR-15 produces.

You feel more recoil with a pistol, sure, but that's misleading in the extreme.

Because I am a giant nerd (I mean, look where I'm posting) I have a folder full of Excel docs I created to collate information to compare it for my own amusement. One of those is about ballistics.

An AR is almost always chambered in 5.56x45mm, a NATO standard caliber. The actual projectile in a 5.56 round is super super small -- like, 62 grams. But there's a LOT of powder behind it, so it delivers on the order of 1800 J.

Glocks are most often in 9mm, which is the most popular handgun round in the world. The actual bullet for 9mm is about TWICE as massive, but has so much less powder, and so much less barrel to spin up, that its downrange energy is typically less than 500J -- ie, like 28% of the AR.

But the Glock will buck in your hand, for sure. It takes training and practice to be able to hit the target reliably over and over.

An AR, though, is insanely stable for lots of reasons -- obviously, it's heavier than the pistol, but that's not all of it. There's some clever design involved. But the end result is a gun that most any trainable person can learn to shoot accurately very, very quickly. The marriage of 5.56 and the AR platform creates a weapon that's really insanely good at rapid, accurate fire.

This made it very successful as a military rifle, and makes it a serious terror in the hands of someone bent on bad acts.