It's not much worse for them than any other culture of the time actually. You have to remember that as near as we can tell from records they likely were originally Greek, being descendants of survivors of Troy... at least if you discount the official origin story where the founders were raised by wolves and the people just sort of happened without a decent explanation because mythology?
Yes there is still recoil but a lot of modern firearm recoil is due to the explosion and the movement of the internal mechanism's. If you remove that then it becomes a lot easier to keep on target unless the round itself is big enough to cause a wake.
While it's not possible to remove recoil under modern physics, it is possible to minimize its effects on the shooter. If, for instance, the whole barrel is isolated on springs from the main rifle body, then most of the equal and opposite reaction force will go into moving the barrel backward, transferring only some of it to the shooter. In fact, this is how machine guns work. They redirect the kinetic energy of the recoil into the mechanism which ejects the spent round and chambers the new one.
Not only that, but
any automatic or semi-automatic (self-loading but one round per pull of the trigger) firearm gets significantly reduced recoil from the internal mechanism. Recoil-operated guns, like frommerman described, use clockwork mechanisms to directly convert recoil momentum into useful work (opening the bolt, ejecting the spent casing, chambering the next round, and closing the bolt again). Blowback-operated guns (typically only used for handguns because it rather limits the power of the ammo that you can use) use a somewhat similar technique without the reciprocating barrel, instead using the gas pressure in the chamber to force the bolt to open and springs to carry out the rest of it. Gas-operated guns like the AK (and, honestly, most automatic rifles) actually tap some of the combustion gasses out of the barrel once the bullet is beyond a certain point in it and uses them to operate the mechanism. All of these take some of the energy that would otherwise go into recoil and put it into instead cycling the action, meaning that there is significantly less felt recoil.
Even more important than actual recoil (the weapon moving back in keeping with m1v1 + m2v2 == mivi momentum conservation), though, is
muzzle rise, which comes from the lever effect of recoil pressing back into the shooter's support (palm for handguns, shoulder for long guns) with the center of pressure above the point of support. This is essentially impossible to prevent in handguns (think about the arrangement that would be needed to have the barrel effectively in line with the shooter's palm, and what that would do when the slide comes back to load the next round), and the need for effective sights makes it very difficult to do in long guns, because of the need to have the sights line up with the shooter's eye while he has the gun shouldered. You gain some benefit from the shooter basically leaning his head to the side to press his cheek into the gun's stock and line his eye up with the sights, but his eye line will still be a few inches above his shoulder; the most common solution to this is to put "rise" into the stock where there's something of an upward bend (or downward curve) to the stock, with the barrel lined up above the top of the buttplate on the stock. The AR-15 family of rifles (including the M16) has unusually low muzzle rise for their chambering because Eugene Stoner instead designed the rifle to have no rise on the stock (because he put the spring that closes the bolt
inside the stock); to compensate for this, you end up with the famous "high-rise" sights that stick several inches up above the barrel and actually use the carrying handle as the rear sights. Muzzle rise is important because it actually pushes the aimpoint off the target, while recoil just feels like a kick into your shoulder/palm. (One standing joke about the old M14 rifle was due to it having heavy muzzle rise in full-automatic fire; the claim was that in full-auto, the first round would hit, the second round would miss high, the third round would miss higher, and after that, you're getting into anti-aircraft fire.)
The sights also provide a good reason for preferring a longer gun in most situations--the longer barrel doesn't provide
that much more velocity or accuracy directly from ballistic effects (and, indeed, too long a barrel can actually reduce velocity if it's so long that the combustion gases have time to fully expand to ambient atmospheric pressure before the bullet leaves the barrel); the accuracy benefit comes from having a longer distance between front and rear sights, and thus a narrower range of eye positions relative to the barrel that provide proper sight alignment. In other words, with a longer barrel, you have to get your eye closer to perfect alignment with the barrel and sights to be able to draw a bead on your target, and thus, you have less range for error in your aiming, so your shots will land closer to your point of aim (assuming, of course, the sights are aligned properly).
I
can see how the coilgun/railgun could well be mechanically far less complex than the AK. The AK is a gas-operated rifle that uses gas tapped off the barrel near the muzzle to power a clockwork mechanism that unlocks the bolt, slides it back, and ejects the spent cartridge, then relies on a spring to push the bolt back forward and strip the next round off the top of the magazine (held in place by a spring in the magazine and then guided in by the shape of the feed ramp and the shape of the round), ram it into the chamber, and then lock the bolt. The coil/rail gun version wouldn't need a bolt (locking or not) to close the breech, or any complex mechanism to feed the next round into the chamber; without chemical propellant, the magnets could throw the slug and then a simple spring in the magazine could push the next one up into position for firing, replacing a couple of dozen moving parts with just one. It would be
electronically vastly more complex, but from a mechanical standpoint, it would become simplicity itself...
