It was a precisely engineered, pitiless piece of machinery.  It was impervious to unrelenting anger; despair; the feeling of brief, electric exhilaration when his finger squeezed the trigger until the instant when the fun leapt upward, leaving a single hole precisely where he had intended it to be.  It was the product of thousands of hours, of days, of focused design and engineering, all for a single, terrible purpose.  Terrible, at least, writ large; terrible in the context of a race of beings that had always, and would always, kill.  But seen more precisely, as if through a camera that zoomed inward from a hazy philosophical panorama, down through clouds of abstraction, finally reaching a moment in inescapable, human time: a man, alone, his face wet with tears as he grasped at shreds of what had once been human connection and meaning.  A woman on a darkened street, hearing footsteps quickening behind her, and reaching into her jacket.  A soldier, surrounded by horror and chaos, seeing the human form of one intent on killing him.  

Or a son, pondering the irreplaceable that has been snatched from him.