Generally it's a good idea to just reset everything to 0 0 0. You can try compiling without zeroing the model and seeing what happens.

Thank you very much; just wanted to clear that up.

Ok really sorry to bother you again, and I appreciate your help, but I did what you said, put it at 0,0,0, and now in the preview, it floats above snipers head. I can't help but think it has something to do with where I placed it in blender. Any ideas/help?

You might want to start with a fresh rig. Start a new blender scene, import the sniper + his bone rig again, import your model, reassign bones and re-export. You can normalize the position/scale/rotation of your model by pressing ctrl+a and selecting "position", "scale", and "rotation" (after you already positioned your model and assigned it to the appropriate bones).

I've found it useful to move the rig and the player model so that the primary bone that the item is being parented to is at 0,0,0, then aligning the item, parenting it to the bone and exporting from there.