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Notes -
ARs are actually quite a bit more lethal than their most common size of projectile otherwise suggests due to the cheapest rounds being inherently able to fragment. Those who criticize ownership of them are directionally correct they're more powerful but for exactly none of the reasons they claim.
It's not a great choice for hunting for that reason (well, that and those rounds are generally illegal to use for hunting, but for a completely different reason), since the entire goal is to preserve the body and one jagged hole is easy to cut out of meat.
For defensive applications that obviously isn't a concern, so you want a bunch of holes rather than one big hole since that increases the chance you hit something important. Machines, including biological ones, don't meaningfully malfunction until you sever an electrical connection (parts downstream stop working), a hydraulic connection (parts downstream stop working; other parts lose functionality due to lack of working fluid), or physically destroy the CPU (but only if you destroy the specific parts responsible for executing either the main program or the other two); fragmentation increases the number of holes, thus increasing the chances of those things happening. There are also vital components that run off that fluid- damaging parts closer to its source, the main pump for example, tends to break the machine faster.
Another way to increase the number of holes if you're using a thing designed to punch holes is to use a punch that can make more holes faster; if I have 17 chances to punch a 0.36" hole and 0.25s to re-point the punch vs. 7 chances to punch a 0.45" hole and it takes me 0.5s to re-point the punch (or in the AR's case, 30 chances to punch 1x 0.2" hole with 0.1s to re-point vs. 20 chances to punch 1x 0.3" hole with 1.5s to re-point), obviously more chances are better provided the hole is punched sufficiently hard to break the stuff in the target (which .32/.25 guns from 1900 are not quite powerful enough to do consistently unless you're using the "I can punch more holes" trick- shotguns with 00 Buck are ballistically identical to 10 .32s taped together so they fire all at once; #4 buckshot is identical to taping 25 .22LR rifles together in the same way- or shooting the CPU).
Modern trauma medicine is really good at patching holes in machines so long as there aren't too many of them, the machine still has hydraulic fluid in it and the CPU isn't shot out (it's not great at fixing electrical connections, but the top half will probably remain fully functional). If a criminal is focused on body count they tend to only put one or two holes in the machines' center mass (for pragmatic reasons)- which is why doctrine for dealing with those criminals is "kill it as soon as possible" and not "wait for the hydraulic fluid of the casualties to run out" or "give the criminal time to consider shooting CPUs".
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