Determine Your Dominant Eye Before Shooting a Shotgun

Posted on June 10, 2016, 12:55 pm
3 mins

One of the most important things that are often overlooked in shooting is which eye is dominant. The dominant eye is the one that the brain will see with first within milliseconds of the image seen out of the non-dominant eye. There are three kinds of master dominant eye;

There’s the one that’s on the side that you write on, or that you mount your gun.
If you are cross-dominant, it might be the left eye if you’re right-handed.
Or if both of them neither one is dominant you have what we call cross-dominant.
There are several ways to determine your master eye;

One of the easiest ways is to point your finger at an image across the room with both eyes opened, then close one eye and then the other.
Your master eye will keep the finger on the object, and your non-dominant eye will cause the finger to jump off the object.
A more accurate way is to hold a tube from the center of a piece of paper towel or roll a paper towel in your hand and look through it with both eyes opened, and I bet you’ll see my right eye down the tube.
And what is important about this is that when you mount your gun, we’re going to unload the gun here is when you mount your gun, it comes up with your master eye over the rib, so that you see the bird with your master eye.
What if I’m right-handed, and my left-eye is the dominant eye? There are several things you can do. If you wear a glasses, you can put a little piece of a tape over that lens. As you mount your gun just before you fire, all you have to do is close that eye. It’s good to leave it open as long as possible because that gives you gap perception or binocular vision, but you can wink that eye shut just as you make the shot and your master eye will be down the rib. It’s very important that you determine your master eye and then use it, what information you gather so that your eye is down the rib because the most important thing in shotgun shooting is not looking at the gun, but looking at the target. If the wrong eye is looking at the target, your barrel to target correlation is not going to be correct, and you’ll miss. Good luck!

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