How to Deal with Cross-Eye Dominance, Solutions for Better Shooting

When your dominant eye is different than your dominant hand you have cross-eye dominance. This can cause you to have problems shooting if you don’t know how to deal with the situation. It’s not always as easy as shooting only with your dominant eye.

What is Cross-Eye Dominance?

When you focus on an object you naturally focus one eye more than the other.  This is called your dominant eye.  70% of the population is right-eye dominant, while 29% are left eye dominant. Since the majority of people are right-handed this means it’s fairly common that your dominant hand to match your dominant eye.

There are those people who have cross-eye dominance.   This is where you are right-handed but left-eye dominant, or left-handed and right eye dominant.  Although not a huge issue most of the time.  It can definitely cause problems when you are shooting a gun.  Guns are by design set up to aim using the same eye as you are using to pull the trigger.  So when you have cross-eye dominance it can make them very hard to aim.

How to Find Eye Dominance

If you don’t know your dominant eye you can’t know if you have cross-eye dominance.  You will have to test yourself to see which eye is dominant. 

The easiest way is to find eye dominance is using your fingers and thumbs to make a triangle with your hands that you can look through.  While holding your hand fully extended look through the triangle at an object.  Make sure that whatever you are looking at barely fits in the triangle.  Now close one eye.  Then close the other eye.  Whichever eye can still see the object is your dominant eye.

If you happen to be one of the lucky ones that are left eye dominant but right-handed you.  You are cross-eye dominant.  Also if you are right eye dominant and left-handed, you are still cross-eye dominant.

Follow Hand or Eye Dominance?

The big question when you have cross-eye dominance is which way do I shoot?  Do shoot with your dominant hand or dominant eye?  If you listen to the NRA they will tell you to always shoot with your dominant eye.  In fact, professional firearms instructors will tell you to shoot with your dominant eye and not your dominant hand.

I’ll tell you it depends.  For those people who only want to shoot handguns.  Do what you are comfortable with.  It will be easier to shoot with your dominant eye. It can be done with your dominant hand.   

Now with rifles, don’t try shooting fast with iron sights, and your dominant hand.  It will never work.  You will spend years practicing to make your non-dominant eye, your dominant eye.  If you want to run a scope or shoot slow,  you can shoot with your dominant hand instead of your dominant eye. However, it’s difficult to do well.

The biggest problem with having cross-eye dominance is aiming quickly and correctly at the same time.  With some time you can concentrate and focus your none-dominant eye, or close one eye and aim.  The problem is doing it quickly isn’t easy.

Tricks that help

Optics

The easiest thing to help you shoot with your dominant hand instead of your dominant eye is an optic.  Instead of using iron sights, use a red dot sight or a scope.  Using a red dot allows you to look at your target with your dominant eye and aim the red dot with the non-dominant eye.  This greatly speeds up your aiming process without forcing you to focus on too many things.  With scope, your eye’s focus on the best picture of the target naturally.  Making the magnified scope reticle the first thing that comes into focus.

Training

The next thing you can do is train your eyes.  This normally involves lots of time shooting.  You will either need to cover your dominant eye with something or force your non-dominant eye to focus on the sights.  Although this works, your eyes can revert back making this a less than ideal solution. If you need you can just close one eye to shoot.

Non-Dominant Hand

Consider shooting with your non-dominant hand.  This is the best option. You can train your non-dominant hand to shoot a rifle or handgun. Granted there are those who just can’t do much with there non-dominant hand. Which means it may be easier and better to try the other options. However, you should at least give shooting with your non-dominant hand a few times just to see what is best for you.

Stance

When shooting a handgun you can easily hold the gun off-center to line up the sights with your dominant eye.  This may not be ideal for recoil management, but it works.  It’s also the fastest way to handle cross-eye dominance with a handgun.  There are some who, cant the gun so to line the sights up better with their dominant eye.  This requires more coordination and practice.

Conclusion

Having cross-eye dominance is not a problem is you know how to handle it.  The easiest is to shoot with your non-dominant hand.  In many ways, it’s easier to train your body to shoot off-hand than to train your eyes.  However, if you can’t seem to shoot with your non-dominant hand than try a scope or red dot sight.  Line your handgun sights up with your dominant eye.  If nothing else close one eye or train your eyes to focus on your non-dominant eye.  The most important thing is knowing you have cross-eye dominance and using that information to make sure you hit your target.