How To Deal With Cross-Eye Dominance

With your palms facing away, raise your hands to eye level and extend your arms. Rotate your wrists inward, allowing the fingers of one hand to overlap the other, stacking your thumbs to form the base of a hollow triangle. Peer through the triangular void between your hands at a nearby object. Now, close one eye. If the object is still visible, the eye that’s open is your dominant eye. If you close the other eye, you’ll notice the object you were looking at appears to move outside the triangle.

Diagnosis

If your dominant eye does not correspond with your dominant hand, you’re considered cross-eye dominant. For a handgun shooter, this can be troublesome, but you do have options.

Many handgun shooters with this affliction compensate by tilting their head to better align their dominant eye with the gun’s sights. The “head tilt” technique works for some people. But it certainly doesn’t seem comfortable, especially to maintain for an extended period.

Another option for cross-eye-dominant handgunners is to tilt the gun rather than their head. This accomplishes the same goal of getting the sights in front of the dominant eye but keeps you from having to crane your neck. Of course, aligning sights and shooting with the handgun tilted presents its own challenges and is bound to take some getting used to.

For some, the solution may involve splitting the difference by tilting their head toward the gun and the gun toward their head. While this may seem like a good idea, the more variables introduced, the harder it will be to aim consistently.

Treatment

If, for instance, you don’t move your head as much or you move your gun too much, there will be a delay as you make the necessary corrections. This may not be a big deal at the range, but in a self-defense situation, a delay in aiming could carry dire consequences. And if ever there was a time when you would be apt to miscalculate the degree to which your head or gun must tilt, it would be during the stress of a deadly-force encounter.

An alternative aiming solution for the cross-eye-dominant handgunner is to simply stage the gun under the dominant eye as part of the draw stroke. Then you can drive the gun to the target, with the sights in front of your dominant eye.

This will probably feel more natural than tilting your head or the gun, or both, and driving the gun out from below your dominant eye is more efficient and faster. Here’s how it works.

Regardless of eye dominance, your draw stroke should involve bringing the gun up from the holster to your chest as you orient the muzzle to the threat. The only tweak for the cross-eye-dominant shooter is to move the pistol across the body’s centerline about six inches or so until it’s below the dominant eye. From there, drive the gun to the target, aligning the sights as your arms extend.

Cure

While shooting with both eyes open affords you a better field of view, enhanced depth perception and aids in situational awareness, shooters may benefit from closing or at least squinting their non-dominant eye to better focus on the sights, particularly the front sight.

Whether or not squinting or even closing an eye is required depends on the proximity and immediacy of the threat as well as the degree of precision required. Inside 10 yards or so, when targeting the chest, you probably won’t need to squint. But making a head shot at 15 yards may require it. If you must squint or close your non-dominant eye to shoot, open it back up as soon as possible.

I’ve heard instructors flippantly suggest cross-eye-dominant shooters learn to shoot the pistol with the hand that corresponds to their dominant eye as if it were an easy task. Learning to shoot a handgun is challenging enough without having to control it primarily with your less-coordinated hand. And if you’re a left-eye-dominant, right-handed shooter gripping primarily with the left hand, the magazine release and slide catch will be on the “wrong” side with most pistols.

Of course, rather than change the hand that holds the gun, you could change the eye you aim with. Occluded-eye drills like shooting with your dominant shooting glasses’ lens covered with tape can force your non-dominant eye to take over. With considerable practice, this may work, but I’m not sure how feasible it is for the average shooter to change eye dominance. I also don’t know whether such a retraining of eye dominance would hold up under the duress of an attack or if you would revert to your body’s naturally dominant eye to aim.

Alternative Remedy

Another consideration for cross-eye-dominant shooters is to use a red-dot sight. Since a red dot places the aiming point and the target on the same visual plane, it’s easier to use than traditional sights, which must be aligned vertically and horizontally. For the cross-eye-dominant shooter, a red-dot sight provides a wider margin of error than traditional sights, which must be directly in front of your dominant eye to be effective.

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