At some point in your life, you would need to have an advantage over others during a gunfight. After all, you are fighting for survival and – most of the time – you only have one shot to save yourself. Likewise, you would need to improve whenever you are hunting for wild animals for food.
So, how can you develop your shooting skills? Well, one of the most effective ways is to have the ability to shoot without having to close one of your eyes.
Understanding Ocular Dominance
Every skilled shooter knows that the first step is to identify the dominant eye. Now, a lot of people believe that your right-handedness or left-handedness would determine whether your right or left eye is the dominant one, but that is not always the case.
For example, being left-handed but having a dominant right eye means that you have something called cross-dominance.
In order to know what your dominant eye is, you first have to directly stare at something. Next, make a triangle sign by extending both of your arms and using your hands to make the shape. After this, try closing your left eye. If you are still able to look at the object, then that means your right eye is the dominant one. If not, then it’s the other way around.
Advantage of Having Both Eyes Open
Being able to keep your eyes open while shooting greatly improves your peripheral vision. If you are in a shootout, you could detect the movements of other people easier. If you are hunting for animals to eat, you wouldn’t have too much trouble observing where they will rush off to escape.
In addition, learning this skill will let you use a gun using either of your hands. Now, you no longer have to rely on just your right or your left hand. Of course, this isn’t going to be easy.
Your initial attempts at switching won’t work out immediately as your muscle memory is already used to whatever hand you used more often for guns. In fact, you will feel the need close one of your eyes, but resist it for as much as you can. Like any other skill, you just have to keep on practicing until you can effortlessly switch hands while keeping your eyes open.
Pistols and Mental Practice
Moving on, pistol use needs some extra attention. This is because pistols are often held using the less dominant hand to lessen the need for body movement as your dominant eye helps place a target.
The important thing here is to strengthen not just your physical control, but also your mental precision. The average shooter would often see two images if they keep their eyes open, regardless of the hand they were using.
In order to win over your muscles and your vision, you must practice over and over. At some point, your vision would remove one of the images to prevent confusion.
Do not give up. It is going to be incredibly difficult, but the results will be worth it. Ideally, your brain will provide the same clarity whether you’re using your dominant eye or not.
