Why is my animation not playing?

Thanks for checking my question out, I am having so much trouble trying to get my player to play an animation. I have an animation controller on my gameobject, a transition named Shoot in my animator and a button that runs ShootBullet(). I get the error that says “Animator is not playing a Playable”. I am not sure what to do, I have looked at dozens of websites for help with no luck. I am not sure if it has something to do with my player being a prefab and getting instantiated into the game, but either way I would have no idea how to fix that. I will include my script and a screen shot of my Animator. I would love to get some feedback because I have been stuck on this for quite some time now. Thanks for the help!

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using MoreMountains.Tools;
public class RaycastGun : MonoBehaviour {

	public Rigidbody Bullet;
	public float speed = 20;
	public Animator anim;
	int shoot = Animator.StringToHash("Shoot");


	// Use this for initialization
	void Start () {
		anim = GetComponent<Animator> ();
		anim.enabled = true;

	}
	
	// Update is called once per frame
	void Update () {

	}
		

	public void ShootBullet()
	{
		anim.SetBool (shoot, true);
		Rigidbody instantiatedProjectile = Instantiate (Bullet, transform.position, transform.rotation) as Rigidbody;
		instantiatedProjectile.velocity = transform.TransformDirection (new Vector3 (0, 0, speed));

	}
}

Hello there, OK, normally you trigger an animation state by changing some state variable (float, bool, int, etc.), you can modify it by script (get or set), this way you can control how to change between animation states, cheers.