Your welcome , It seemed a odd question. You already knew the answer.

You can remove the second empty ent_animate() inside the else. Also I didn't try but you should be able to do the logic on the animation variables in the if()else() blocks and then put all the animation instructions in a block at the end with a little logic, like the example from ent_animate.

EDIT* Looking at the manual I think the ent_blendpose() would end up being better as you can compose pose layers. It looks like you are going to end up with many ANM_ADD's like Shooting, Reloading, Middle-finger-in-the-air , ect...