Animating guns that you can pickup

Currently I am working on a project and I have to animate guns and magazine for reload animations but my arms and gun is a seperated object and I can handle that with parenting gun to my arms but I don't know how to animate guns you can pickup because the object will be gone when you drop it so I need to know how the animator will react to a dropped object (even tho ı won't play the dropped guns animation) Currentl I don't have a character so I cannot try and I need to know can I do animations when I pickup the gun and will the animation stay uncorrupted when I drop the gun ? Please answer quickly I'll do the character model based on this answer.