Hmmm, destroying him then respawning a new one would look a little weird. That would cause the old one to disappear and the new one to appear very quickly. I am having that same problem when I try to destroy and entity and make it spawn again without the player noticing.
I imagine you may be able to script into the guy's ai script that if the player is in the zone, then "shootplr", which will run the guy's shooting ai script.
Not sure about the intimate details, though. Might wanna try that out and let me know if it worked.
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