Perfectly balanced: there are 32 Avengers: Endgame character posters; exactly half of them are characters who are alive, and half are characters who are dead.

Even where straight up killing is concerned, even if a machine gun were absolutely necessary I can see Cap not being very happy about having to resort to using one. Indiscriminately firing into a mass of people just doesn't match his ethos. There's also just something more cold and distant and impersonal about guns that I can see him being uncomfortable about. Steve doesn't enjoy being a human weapon, but he embraces it in the name of protecting/defending something. Even if he can deal destruction with his fists and shield, I think in the back of his mind that still boils down to a man-to-man fight which just instinctively feels like a more fair/even fight, and at the end of the day he really values fairness.

Even with Skurge, I think the point of the machine guns for him was that they had this mystique of being rare, badass weapons from Midgard that nobody else but him had, because he felt weak/unspecial when surrounded by the likes of Thor or the Warriors Three. He didn't care about them in their practical weapons capacity.

Fact of the matter is that characters have personal biases and motivations that color their decisions beyond "what weapon deals the most damage?"

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