Weapon Animation Blueprint How to get IsFiring from ShooterCharacter

I am attempting to modify the ShooterGame example to build an example of my weapon.
I would like the weapon to play an animation montage when the player start shooting and stop the animation when it the player stops shooting. I cannot seem to get the right ‘Get…’ function to make the cast to ShooterCharacter work. (So that I can get the IsFiring’ Variable/Output).
I have set the Animation Mode to ‘Use Animation Blueprint’ in the ‘Mesh1P’ section of the Animation section of the ‘WeapGun’ class Defaults.
I can get the animation to fire if I remove the cast and get functions and just use Montage Play. But my debug only ever show cast to ShoortCharacter failing.
Thanks,
Matt