What I found to be the best way to manage weapons is setting everything on the character and just use a pawn with the weapons mesh as a trigger to set character has weapon to true. So on your Character Components put all the weapon meshes and set to hidden in game. When the Character hits the Weapon Pawn you just destroy the pawn, set has weapon to true, unhide the weapon, and use preset arrays to hold the weapons stats such as ammo, projectile type, reload, etc.