FPS Multiplayer character animation / behaviour

Hello,

This is my first question here and I hope this is the right place to ask it.

I'm working on a multiplayer FPS game and I'm stuck at the point for animating the jump, recoil of the gun etc. I already know how to animate this and how to make it work in Unity, but the real question is: How do you deal with those animations when you need to support multiple weapons?

I mean, it is a little weird to create all walk, jump animations from scratch for every weapon (I need to have the whole character model as the player, since it's a multiplayer, correct me if I'm wrong with this one). Isn't there a way/trick to have a single walking/jumping/etc. animation for the character and only the recoil animation for the weapons itself?

I hope this was clear, I will explain it better tomorrow morning.

Steffen