Firearms could be devastating when you had a whole bunch of people to keep up a sustained fighting despite most of the people at a given time being busy reloading (and the firearms pretty much ditched if the opponent closed on you anyway). Also the range and accuracy were crap, which was still dangerous enough when you had a volley of a bunch at once fired vaguely toward a bunch of opponents.

In terms of being afraid of what a single person could in isolation do to people, the worst they would have ever faced were blades.