The Myth of Eye Dominance in Shotgunning and the Reality of the Subconscious Mind

by Ralph Cushman

INTRODUCTION

 

I live in Alaska and have been teaching youths to shoot shotguns for 20+ years.  I have coached some to very high levels of shooting.  In one sense I am just like the many hundreds of other volunteer kids' coaches around the country.  But in another sense I am fairly unique -- I take kids who are right-handed but have strongly dominant left eyes (or vice-versa) and teach them how to be excellent shotgun shooters shooting off their dominant (usually the right) shoulder with both eyes wide open at all times, and with no tape on their lens or any other vision-blocking/impairing device.
 
The vast majority of professional instructors and coaches say that cannot be done, that is is a waste of time to try.  They simply do not know how to do it.
 
I used to give eye dominance tests to beginners, just like most other coaches/instructors do.  If they tested cross-dominant I would tell them they either needed to shoot with the gun on their weak side, close their left eye or wear a piece of tape on their left lens.  Over time, however, I came to suspect that approach was less than optimal, at best.  I had heard of people who were cross-dominant but who shot championship scores with both eyes open and the gun on their strong side.  I determined that I would figure out why they were able to do that, when so many others say it is impossible.  I figured it out, and wrote this to guide other youth coaches on how to do it.  There is no question in my mind that the cross-dominant shooter who learns to shoot with my method will be a far better, and happier shooter than if s/he had switched to their weak shoulder or occluded.  If you would like to learn how I do it, read on.
 
 
OVERVIEW
 
There are two basic ways to shoot a shotgun.  The first is to shoot consciously seeing the barrel-target-relationship ("BTR"), sometimes called "aiming" or "measuring."  This method has been discouraged by nearly every top shooter and instructor for at least the last hundred years, but nevertheless sees widespread employment in every shotgun discipline, sometimes by people who do not realize they are doing it.
 
The second way is to shoot seeing the BTR, but only in the subconscious, historically called "instinctive" shooting and lauded by practically every famous shotgunning writer from Robert Churchill to Bob Brister to Chris Batha.  They called it "instinctive" even though it did not involve any actual instincts at all, because they did not know what else to call it.  They just knew (well, thought!) they were not seeing the barrel, and I doubt it even occurred to them that they might be seeing it subconsciously.
 
The great majority of shotgun users are in the first group, to one degree or another, and their habit of noticing the BTR while directing the barrel to the target causes their shooting to suffer in ways most never realize.  But, alas, it is hard to make yourself shoot without seeing the BTR unless you were trained to shoot that way from the very beginning.  If you are coaching beginners you should strive to get them to do precisely that.
 
The issue of eye dominance in shotgunning has been settled for decades.  Unfortunately it was settled the wrong way  --  at the point in the shooter's career that he (meaning "he or she" henceforth) demonstrates that his off eye ("off" referring to the eye not lined up with the top-rib) is directing the shotgun, near universal agreement has quickly declared him "cross-dominant" and authoritatively moved to "correct" the problem by preventing his off eye from seeing the gun.
 
It is still going on to today.  Nearly every shotgun instructor anywhere is routinely giving eye dominance tests to new pupils and authoritatively taping the lenses of many of them.  It is almost always the wrong thing to do.
 
Most people reading this article have had what they were sure were "eye dominance" problems.  Some will roll their eyes and quit reading at this point, thinking I simply do not understand the problem they have.  Trust me, I understand it perfectly.  I wrestled with it myself for several years.  I thought anyone minimizing the importance of eye dominance in shotgunning was ignorant.
 
But what I discovered through years of experimenting with kids on my shooting teams is that the effects of eye dominance and shooting technique are highly inter-dependent, and that it is possible to make eye dominance completely immaterial for the vast majority of people who would, by traditional standards, have been considered as having eye dominance "issues"  --  if you can get them to use the right shooting technique and give them the proper instruction.  That is, if you can get them to shoot without consciously noticing the BTR, which is how they should be shooting anyway.
 
That does not mean they will all become champions if they do the right things with their eyes, because for that a person needs the confluence of about 50 unusual traits and factors. But the beginner youth started out doing the right things with his eyes will be able to go as far with his shooting as would be possible under his circumstances.  As a youth coach, you have the opportunity to make it happen, to turn them into potential champions.
 
With so many great, "never see the BTR" shooters out there instructing beginners, why is nearly no one else in the world saying what I am saying -- that it is possible to make eye dominance completely immaterial, no matter what it is?
 
Because they never did the experimentation that I have done with cross-dominant shooters.  They had heard all their shooting lives that the only solution to cross-dominance was to keep the off eye from seeing the gun, or to put the rib under the dominant eye.  They knew that "one-eyed shooting" was not the best way to shoot if you want to produce a champion, but they felt there was simply no other choice for that person.
 
There is a vastly better choice, and I am going to explain here how to coach it.  You can teach youths to be outstanding shots irrespective of their eye dominance, even if you are not yourself a champion shooter.
 
 
DiDick L. teaching a future bunker
   champion how to shoot it.
 
For the sake of simplicity, let us assume henceforth that all the people discussed here are right-handed, shooting off their right shoulder (unless stated otherwise) and have two good, normally functioning eyes, irrespective of whatever "dominance" they may have.  (Obviously, if the shooter in question is left-handed he must hold a mirror up to what I write.)
 
In April of 2019 a poster on Trapshooters.com started a thread entitled "Female Shooters Using Two Eyes" and asked the following:
 
"I’m wondering what some people think the percentage of female trap shooters are successfully able to shoot with both eyes open? I’ve heard numbers as high as 90% of females must use a form of one-eyed shooting. Your thoughts?"
 
He got replies steeped in what has long been the received wisdom on the subject, with almost all responders agreeing that the vast majority of females' dominant eye is not on the same side as their dominant hand, and therefore they have to compensate for that shortcoming in order to shoot a shotgun well. To compensate, the received wisdom goes, they can either shoot off their weak shoulder, put tape on the off-lens of their shooting glasses or close their off-eye.
 
 

 "A hell of a lot of people, Dutch, just 
 can't stand to be wrong."
 
But I have for years trained beginners, male and female, to ignore eye dominance and shoot off their strong shoulder with both eyes wide open.  Even the cross-dominant ones have done very well shooting that way.
 
How could that possibly happen?
 
Simple  --  first I got them to do all of their aiming with their subconscious mind, and then I trained their subconscious on what it needs to see.  But I explain how I did that, let you give you a good reason to believe what I am saying -- and that good reason is Bayne Horne, a south Texas cotton farmer.

Bayne is one of the very top Sporting Clays shooters in the world, even though he is strongly left-eye dominant while shooting right-handed with both eyes always on the target (no winking or taped lens).
 

In the 2022 NSCA National Championship Main Event Bayne placed 6th.  A year later in the Natl. Champ. Main Event, when he was 60, he placed 2nd in the Main Event, beating every other shooter there except Brandon Powell.  Bayne taught himself to shoot two-eyed in spite of his eye dominance issue, and is definitely someone you should listen to before you tape your or someone else's lens.
Bayne and I did a podcast in 2022 which you can listen to here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znUpTjxhI2M


 
People patch their off-lens because they think they need to "help their brain" pick the right image. But such "help" is not only unnecessary, it tends to encourage a defective form of shooting --  a fleeting noticing of the barrel in the last part of their move to the target. It is not so much a "glance" right at it as it is a mere noticing of the barrel in the periphery. But, the next thing you know, they are noticing it just a wee bit earlier and/or more closely and it causes a slowing of the swing at the end of the move, and a miss. Or, even if does not cause a slowing down, when they are noticing the barrel they are not reading the target right out to and through the trigger-pull, and that can cause a miss. That is especially true on fast targets like bunker, but it can even happen with short-range, hanging lobs.
  
I do not believe any man has ever shot one-eyed in an Olympics Trap Final. I did see a man with tape on his lens shooting bunker in a World Cup Final years ago, but he did not fare well. The young women are becoming like the men -- a higher and higher percentage of them are showing up at World Cups and in the Olympics shooting two-eyed, and winning. I think it will soon be common knowledge that while people can do impressive things shooting with only one eye, it is a defective way to shoot that should be avoided by anyone with two normally functioning eyes. If their right eye is truly defective or does not work at all, then, yes, they will need to switch shoulders.  But that should never be done if the only "defect" is dominance.

The problem is that heretofore nearly no one knew how to teach a cross-dominant shooter so that their eye dominance becomes completely immaterial.  It requires a combination of teaching them to shoot with no conscious noticing of their barrel at all, coupled with training their subconscious how to us both images  simultaneously, so that it does not matter which image of the two is "dominant."  If you can keep reading you will learn how to do both.


EYE DOMINANCE -- IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
 
All our waking hours each of our eyes is producing a distinct image and sending it to our brain. Without our having to give it the slightest conscious thought, our subconscious melds those two images into one apparently seamless image, enabling us to see three-dimensionally, with depth-perception. We can notice what our eyes are seeing with our conscious mind if we wish to, but we do not have to. We can if we wish let our subconscious control everything and just enjoy the movie.
 
If it is an option, our subconscious will almost always choose binocular vision. However, if for some reason binocular vision is not possible, our subconscious will use the image from only one of our eyes and make the best of it. When thus forced to pick from one image or the other (as when looking through a scope or camera viewfinder), the eye supplying the most-often-chosen image is called the "dominant" eye.
 
The first important fact for our analysis is that both images are sharp and clear, and on most people, equally strong. One is as good as the other. Just because you have a "dominant" eye does not mean there is anything defective with your non-dominant image, or your brain's ability to use it.  
 
If you point at an object with your index finger while keeping both eyes open and your focus on the object, you will, if you notice, see two fingers.  You are creating an image with each eye.  The eye that is in line with the finger (generally the dominant eye) will seem to produce a more clear image, but that is an illusion brought about by consciously noticing the in-line finger.  Line the finger up with the other eye and it will appear to be the stronger image.  That is why some people can shoot very well, and nearly equally well, off either shoulder with both eyes open.  They keep the barrel images in their subconscious, which has no trouble learning to pick the image that in line with an eye, regardless of which eye it is.  It matters not which eye is the "dominate" one.
 
"We suggest here that the eye identified as the dominant one in a sighting task is determined by nothing more than the constraint of the sighting task that only one eye be used and the ease or the habit of using a particular eye to perform the task (Barbeito, 1981; Miles, 1928; Ono & Barbeito, 1982). We also suggest that other than being the “preferred” eye in some viewing situations, the sighting-dominant eye has no special role for visual or oculomotor processes for the normal population.

 "To illustrate this view, we present the following gedanken, or thought experiment, to demonstrate what we mean by our suggestion that sighting dominance is nothing more than a preference for a particular eye.  Imagine measuring ear preference, or “dominance,” as defined operationally by the ear to which a telephone is placed."

Perception & Psychophysics, 2003, 65 (2), 310-317, "What does the dominant eye dominate? A brief and somewhat contentious review," Map, Ono and Barbeito, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
 
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03194802.pdf
 

When a shooter attempts to consciously visually align his shotgun barrel with a target, he forces his conscious brain to use only one of the two available image-streams, because the conscious mind cannot process two image-streams simultaneously.  If his brain uses the image over the rib, all is well, but if for any reason it uses the image from the off eye, the sighting job is flummoxed.
 
Which leads us to the second important fact  --  in shooting a shotgun there is never any reason to force your brain to pick one image over the other.  There is no reason to not let the subconscious freely see and use both image-streams simultaneously, something the conscious mind cannot handle.
 
Tests have proven that it is not possible to accurately shoot a shotgun without seeing where the barrel is, relative to the target. Let me repeat that, lest anyone be confused by what I am going to say later: it is impossible to (consistently) accurately shoot a shotgun without seeing the barrel.
 
However, you can do all the seeing of the barrel needed to shoot a shotgun accurately with your subconscious alone. Even more to the point, your subconscious can process the images needed to accurately aim your shotgun about 100x faster than your conscious mind can, which means it will, once it has been trained, do the job of aiming much, much better than the conscious mind can.  
 
When we shoot a mounted shotgun with both eyes open, the subconscious receives an image-stream from the right eye looking down the rib on the top of the barrel, and an image-stream from the left eye looking along the left side of the barrel(s). That is inescapable geometry.
 
The simultaneous images, if consciously noticed, are confusing to a shooter at first, so accurately aiming with his subconscious is not something the beginner perfects overnight.  You, his coach, have to train his subconscious mind what it needs to see, and there is no way to do that short of shooting a lot of targets, while never letting him (consciously) see his barrel.  Every time he hits a target without consciously noticing his barrel, his subconscious learns what it should do and see for that particular presentation.  Every time he misses, his subconscious learns what it should not do.  But that process takes time.
 
An instructor can get much, much faster "progress" in the typical cross-dominant shooter (or even the more typical shooter with a mildly dominant right eye) by simply taping the student's off lens.  The student can suddenly hit High 2 on the skeet field, or is no longer occasionally looking down the side of the gun.  He leaves the lesson thinking he got his money's worth.
 
He didn't.  All he did was learn to consciously aim better.  Learning to shoot two-eyed with subconscious aiming takes a lot longer, but in the end it is a much, much better way to shoot, and it makes eye dominance immaterial.  It also eliminates vision-induced flinching (manifested as an inability to pull the trigger at times), which is epidemic among aimers, which is to say, one-eyed shooters.
 
So why don't more people shoot the correct way?  Because the vast majority of people learn to shoot a shotgun with either no coach at all or a coach who does not try to get them to shoot without consciously seeing the barrel.  Trying to see the BTR makes perfect sense to the beginner anyway.
 
The typical shooting instructor, even some with a high certification, counter-productively instructs beginners and intermediate shooters concerning "sight pictures."  They could hardly give worse advice.

The natural inclination for most learners is, from the outset, to AIM the barrel at the target anyway, so without strong admonitions against noticing the barrel, he does, and the bad habit has started incubating.  Even if the beginner is told to not "see" the barrel, there is an immediate obstacle to success  --  he cannot (by definition) see what his subconscious is seeing.  He has no way of knowing his subconscious is even paying attention to the aiming task, much less whether it is doing a good job, other than to view his shooting results, which can take weeks to develop.  To do your aiming subconsciously requires a huge leap of faith, at least in the early stages, one that many people find illogical and unsettling.  Almost all must have constant, proper coaching to learn to aim with their subconscious.

Even once I get experienced one-eyed shooters to shoot with both eyes open and without consciously seeing the BTR, and they crush a target for the first time shooting that new way, they are still perplexed.  They invariably say something like, "I have no idea why that just happened," or "I have no idea how I hit that target."
 
That's okay, if they stick with it, they will understand soon enough.
 
The cross-firing shooter will often complain that he finds himself "suddenly looking down the left side" of his gun when he was trying to look down his top-rib to line the barrel up with the target. He will say his left eye "suddenly took control," leaving him trying to steer the gun with a worthless image. The problem was not that his left eye was seeing that image, it was that it was seeing it consciously, which resulted in his ignoring the image from the right eye.  We know he had done that because no one who restricts their viewing of the barrel to their subconscious ever says things like that.  They never feel like one eye has "control" over the other, and indeed correctly assume they are viewing the target with both eyes equally.
 
Now whenever someone tells me they are "seeing the left side of the gun" I tell them, "Good -- that will remind you to stop letting yourself see the gun at all when you are shooting and instead just see only the target!"
 
Whenever someone tells me they "cross-fire" at times even when they are not seeing the barrel, I tell them that either they are kidding themself about not seeing the barrel or they simply have not shot enough with purely subconscious aiming to have sufficiently trained their subconscious on what to see.  Once trained, the subconscious never uses the "wrong" image to position (i.e., aim) the gun.  It never fails to use both images simultaneously.  If you missed, you missed for some reason other than eye dominance.
 
While the subconscious does a great job of getting the gun to shoot to the spot you want by processing images at high speed, your conscious mind is much better at calculating the lead necessary to intercept most difficult targets.  But even there, mistakes can be made.  Shooters will miscalculate the lead needed on a target, and then blame the miss on "cross-firing," when their subconscious put the shot exactly where they told it to.  Even among my strongly cross-dominant students, I have never seen one cross-fire except when they were peeking at the barrel.  As soon as I reminded them to not let themselves notice the barrel, the cross-firing vanished.
 
Most shooters have for as long as they have been shooting heard the maxim that one "aims a rifle but points a shotgun." Every shotgun instructor they have ever heard has preached the importance of having a hard focus on the target. Most shooters know to not "look at the barrel" when shooting. They know to look at the target.
 
But despite having heard these things and swearing they adhere to them, in every shooting endeavor (e. g., trap, skeet or sporting clays shoot) at least 75% of the participants can be seen aiming at (at least) some of their clays. "Aiming" does not just mean trying to see the bead or barrel to the breakpoint, it means letting yourself consciously notice the BTR at all, and that includes in the peripheral vision.
 
You say you don't see your barrel, you just see the "gap" between the barrel and the target? Wrong! You cannot see a "gap" without seeing the stops at either end. If you see the gap you are consciously noticing the barrel (and at the worst possible time, by the way).  You say you see it only in your peripheral vision?  Sorry, consciously noticing it there distracts as well.
 
Even many very accomplished shooters engage in some degree of aiming. They do it and get away with it, right up until the time it makes them miss. Some people can get away with it more often than the rest of us can, but even they have their limits. Also, it depends on what targets you are shooting.  For example, every turkey hunter knows that to hit a tom's head at 40 yards you darned well better aim that shotgun at it.  But I am talking about flying targets.
 
I do not think it is productive to try to talk to people, and especially kids, about their "subconscious," so what I tell them is that they are going to learn to make their shotgun shoot exactly where they want it to by FEEL alone. And, before long they think they are doing exactly that. They see the target and they FEEL (but do not see) the gun go to where it needs to be and they pull the trigger.
 
But what they are actually doing is seeing the barrel in their subconscious, and using those subconscious images to steer the gun and to know when to trigger. The task of the coach is to keep it in the subconscious, because logic tells the shooter that if he would just notice his barrel a wee bit, he would shoot even better. One way you, as the coach, will help him keep his viewing of the gun in his subconscious is by keenly observing his barrel movement. You will see, in his barrel, the inevitable AIMING trying to slither back under the tent wall, and you will unhesitatingly smash it.  When you see the slowing or pausing of the swing right as the barrel reaches the target, you will know he was trying to see the gap.
 
I tell the experienced shooter grappling with "eye dominance" issues, but who wants to lose the patch he is going to have to commit to learning to shoot a whole new way  --  he is going to have to learn to trust his subconscious to do the aiming.  Of course, he looks at me funny because he had no idea that he even had a subconscious.
 
You have to very consciously see the target, and then consciously begin the move to the break-point, but all the final positioning ("aiming") of the shotgun, and the knowing of when the gun is at the desired break-point, should take place entirely in the subconscious. Your subconscious should tell you when to pull the trigger, not some (conscious) "sight picture." The sensation should be that you are getting the barrel to the break-point completely by FEEL.  You consciously pull the trigger, but only when the subconscious tells your hand to.  If you are really doing it right it almost feels like the subconscious is pulling the trigger.
 
You cannot consciously engage your subconscious.  All you can do is to stop your conscious mind from getting in its way by trying to "help" it. You do that by focusing so intensely on the target and what it is doing that you do not notice the barrel AT ALL while moving to the break-point.
 
That is difficult for most people to do.  As Dan Carlisle, one of the greatest shotgun shooters to ever live, put it in a Go Shooting interview with Russel Mark in October 2020:
 
"You take a 12 year old that doesn't know anything about shooting, the first thing you have to do is teach them how to actually see the clay.  It's a survival instinct -- our sport is kill or be killed, either you kill it or it kills you.  That survival part -- you gotta instill that first, and that's looking at the clay. If you look at the gap at the last split-second you stall the gun out and miss -- that's why most people can't shoot.  That's why the magic half a percent of all shotgun shooters are so good  --  half of that half, great.  It is simply because of that reason.  But it's hard to make people quit looking at the gun once they've done it for three or four years."
 
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFl6GCiTA9Y&t=26s
 
[Note:  YouTube apparently changes uplink addresses from time to time.  If the above link does not work just search in YouTube for "go shooting dan carlisle."]

This was a beautiful and generous revelation of the GREAT SECRET to being a top shotgun shooter by Dan.  There have been many great shotgun shooters who have, like Dan, gone on to become highly respected instructors, but you will not hear the above from many of them, at least not for free in an Internet interview.  They know it, but often they will not even try to get a client to quit seeing the barrel because it takes too long to get them to "good" after such a major change, if they can make the change at all.  Also, most people do not want to be taught a whole new way of shooting that is going to take months to learn  --  they want to be made better today.
 
Do you ever wonder why so many of today's great shooters had fathers who were great?  Rick Mein is a national champion sporting clays shooter who has also done something few other ATA trap shooters have ever done, and that was to shoot 100 straight from the 27-yard line in a major tournament.  His son, Derrick Mein, is a great sporting clays champion that also won the right to shoot trap for the U.S. in the Tokyo and Paris Olympics.  Kayle Browning won the silver medal in women's trap at the Tokyo Olympics.  Her dad was sporting clays great Tommy Browning.
 
Sure, it is nice to inherit good genes, but that is not why these kids grew up to be champion shooters.  It is because their fathers taught them from Day One, when they were young, to shoot with both eyes open and without ever (consciously) seeing the barrel.
 
These are fiercely competitive people, meaning that they want to come out on top when they shoot.  If their competitors want to shoot with one eye blocked or by noticing the BTR, that is just fine with them.
 
Many experienced shooters think it is okay for them to notice their barrel while shooting because they are looking at the target.  They will say something like, "I see it all."  True, that can be done to some extent, but they do not see the target as well when they do that, and so they at times misread it when they would not have misread it had they given it their undivided (conscious) attention.  They will never be great because they have not committed the measuring/aiming job to their subconscious.
 
If you can get the beginner to shoot without consciously seeing his barrel at all, you just eliminated the two biggest causes of misses in shotgunning in one fell swoop. He is not trying to aim with a slow image processor, and he is never cross-firing. The only question now is, can you get him to keep the process in his subconscious, and not let his officious conscious mind horn in?
 
I have had kids who were very strongly left eye dominant. It was obvious when I gave them the most reliable "eye dominance test" there is. It is not holding a CD at arm's length and bringing it to your face, because you can if you want easily over-ride your "dominance" and bring the CD to your non-dominant eye. No -- the most reliable test is to have them shoot a shotgun at straight-away targets without aiming, while you see where they are shooting -- the left-eye-dominant beginner will shoot 2 feet to the left of skeet low 7 nearly every time. He will shoot 4 feet to the left of a trap straight-away nearly every time.
 
At first, irrespective of dominance, rank beginners tend to blast all around a flying target, but gradually they get better at mounting and swinging their gun and begin to have it pointed more accurately (or at least consistently) when they trigger. However, the cross-dominant ones still miss, even when not seeing the BTR, because their subconscious has not yet learned, through practice and repetition, how to use the two distinct images of their barrel that their subconscious sees when they are focused on the target, or exactly what barrel relationship to a particular target it must see in order to hit it. You have to train that.
 
Faced with the obstacle of cross-dominance almost none of the esteemed shooting instructors in the country will try to coach the student through the problem. Most do not know they can make eye dominance immaterial for nearly every one of their shooters.  They instead just turn them into one-eyed shooters, which practically guarantees that they will be seeing a whole lot of BTR when they shoot.  They put them firmly on the path to mediocrity.
 
Some instructors advocate using the patch on the off lens in "mildly cross-dominant" beginners only temporarily.  See for example, top sporting clays shooter Brad Kidd:  
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdxlrJPv5is
 
Sure, one can lose the patch later (I did), but it is a waste of time and promotes conscious aiming, necessitating the breaking of that bad habit.  The beginner will get to "good" much faster if you, as coach, take him straight to shooting with both eyes on the target 100% of the time, not both eyes until the patch blocks one of them.  There is absolutely no reason to ever patch someone.
 
If you are a coach and you have been giving your beginners eye dominance tests and encouraging them to switch shoulders or patch their off lens because they tested out cross-dominant, you need to quit it.  You need to ignore their "eye dominance" and start teaching them to shoot the right way.
 
Either that or get yourself a sign:  "Mediocrity instructed here."
 
All this misguided "compensating for eye dominance" is driving people, and especially women, away from shotgunning. For many people, trying to learn to shoot off their left shoulder is just too awkward. Walking around with one eye blocked by tape is distracting and irritating. Being told YOUR gender has defective eyes for shotgunning the first day you walk up to try it tends to make bowling look like a better option.  It is also harming the shooting prospects of the women who are staying in.

   Alesssandra Pirelli winning bronze in
   Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
 
Maddy Bernau was shooting extremely well at the World Cup in Lonato, Italy in May of 2021, and was the clear leader most of the way through the finals. But if you watch the video you will see her get visibly anxious near the end. She starts dropping targets, which causes her to have to go into a shootoff, and then she loses the shootoff to Alessandra Pirelli of San Marino, who shoots with a big piece of tape on her left lens. I have to wonder if Maddy's "insecurity" over the eye dominance issue contributed to her anxiety and cost her the gold:
 
"Does she have an advantage over me because she is compensating and I am not?" I can see her wondering.
 
Pirelli has for years been one of the top women bunker shooters in the world. But one-eyed shooters do not do well when the visibility gets bad. As the light faded at the Rome World Cup in 2016, in the shootoff for gold, Pirelli dropped a target and Natalie Rooney of New Zealand, a two-eyed shooter, didn't, giving Rooney the gold.  In the Women's Trap Finals in Tokyo in 2021 the light faded at the end of the day, and Pirelli faded quickly against her two-eyed competitors.
 
People patch their off-lens because they think they need to "help their brain" pick the right image. But such "help" is not only unnecessary, it tends to encourage a fleeting noticing of the barrel in the last part of their move to the target. It is not so much a "glance" right at it as it is a noticing of the barrel in the periphery. But, the next thing you know, they are noticing it just a wee bit earlier and/or more closely and it causes a slowing of the swing at the end of the move, and a miss. Or, even if does not cause a slowing down, when they are noticing the barrel they are not reading the target right out to and through the trigger-pull, and that can cause a miss. That is especially true on fast targets like bunker, but it can even happen with short-range, hanging lobs.
  
The defenders of one-eyed shooting bring up the examples of famous ATA champion Nora Ross, and Suzy Balogh of Australia, who won gold in women's bunker at the 2004 Olympics, to prove that one-eyed shooting works just fine.
 

   Suzanne Balogh
 
But Ross does not compete in bunker, and in the 2012 Games in London, after making the finals, Balogh fell apart and shot a 15 out of 25, a very low score in an Olympics final. Others who shot there said the high, green shot-screen behind the target field made seeing the targets very difficult. One-eyed shooters can do amazing things, but it is folly to think that one eye is as good as two when it comes to rea
 
I do not believe any man has ever shot one-eyed in an Olympics Trap Final. I did see a man with tape on his lens shooting bunker in a World Cup Final years ago, but he did not fare well. The young women are becoming like the men -- a higher and higher percentage of them are showing up at World Cups and in the Olympics shooting two-eyed, and winning. I think it will soon be common knowledge that while people can do impressive things shooting with only one eye, it is a defective way to shoot if there is any way to avoid it. If their right eye is truly defective or does not work at all, then, yes, they will need to switch shoulders.  But that should never be done if the only "defect" is dominance.
 
Most taped-lens shooters are shooting that way because some well meaningbut ignorant club coach taped them when they first started shooting, and they forever after think they have an "eye dominance" defect and cannot shoot without it. Removing the tape after years of shooting with it deluges the left eye with images it has never been privy to before, so naturally the conscious mind wants to examine them. 
 
They could train to shoot with their subconscious in time, but they do not even try, or give up too soon. It is too easy to just put the tape back on and say there is no other way for them.  Or, if they do try, they are not able to stop consciously noticing the barrel, and so are bound to fail.  
 
The two-eyed women are pushing themselves to better and better scores. Zuzanna Stefecekova shot a perfect 125 in qualification in the Tokyo Olympics. That was the first time the women shot that many targets in the qualification round, so it was an Olympic record, but it was also a new women's world record, and something that has only rarely been done by any of the men.

I doubt it will be many more years before it is common knowledge that you are wasting your time trying to win at trap in the Olympics shooting occluded.

DEALING WITH EYE DOMINANCE ISSUES -- STEP BY STEP

Annie, who was 13 for most of 2021, is my youngest shooter right now, and she has fired the fewest lifetime rounds downrange of any of my current kids. When she started out in the spring of 2021, after a short spat of missing more or less randomly all around the target, she settled down and started shooting consistently. But, with every shot she was 2 feet to the left of skeet low 7 even as I told her she was missing to the left. She was, as I instructed her, not letting herself consciously see the barrel, but the results showed she was clearly strongly left-eye dominant.  She was subconsciously seeing and directing the barrel with her left eye because her subconscious did not know any better.  We just needed to train her subconscious which image to use, which was actually very easy to do.  You can read how in the section entitled "Coaching Through Eye Dominance Issues -- Step By Step," below.
 
Just a few months later Annie was crushing skeet and trap straight-aways with ease, even though she is still shooting off her strong shoulder with both eyes wide open. She was at least as likely to break a difficult crosser (either direction) as any other kid on the team. On bunker she would often break twice as many targets as the next best kid, all shooting standard-velocity 7/8 oz loads. It is as if she never had an eye dominance issue.  But if she lets herself consciously notice her barrel, she will miss to the left.  Simple!  She should never shoot that way, and she has learned that.
 
From the success Annie is having now it is obvious that there are no limits to where she can go with her shooting. It just depends on the other 49 factors. But even if some of my kids someday decide two-eyed shooting is holding them back, they can always later put the tape on their lens. The converse is not true -- my experience is that if a beginner gets taped and shoots that way for a few years, even one who never should have been taped, it will probably be very difficult for them to wean themselves off the patch.
 

I taught the five kids in the above photo to shoot.  Three of them, including one of the girls who shot r-handed with no occlusion or winking even though she was fiercely left-eye dominant, went on to win Gold Medals in a Junior Olympics.  I don't know of another coach who say that about any three shooters they coached, and none can say it about a cross-dominant shooter shooting on their strong side two-eyed.

Blocking ("occluding") one eye with a piece of tape does not keep you from being very good. It just keeps you from ever being as good as you would have been had you learned to shoot with no occlusion.

WHERE DID THAT SHOT GO?

To be a good shotgun coach you simply must be able to see where the student is shooting when he misses. Otherwise the beginner will have no clue what correction he needs to make. Also, where they miss will often tip you off as to why they missed.

You will hear a lot people pooh-poohing instructors who can only tell where you missed, but not why.  I have never actually seen one of those people, but if they did exist they would be of little use much of time.  However, there are many times when very good shooters are simply getting the lead wrong, and being told where they are enables them to quickly fix the problem.  To instruct the cross-dominant shooter, the coach must be able to see where the shots are going, otherwise the beginner will start trying to "check alignment" to see where.

To see where they are missing you just look over their shoulder and watch the barrel and the target. You as coach need to be watching the barrel every shot anyway for any slowing of the swing or a stutter move, indicating the shooter is aiming/measuring. It is much easier for you to learn this on skeet Low 7 than it is on, for example, oscillating trap targets.
 
In time you will get good at seeing where the barrel is pointed relative to the target at the moment the trigger gets pulled. You will know where the shot is going before it leaves the barrel. It is an invaluable tool for coaching. The way you get good at it is by watching over the shoulders of kids for tens of thousands of rounds. You will know when you have it right when the shooters repeatedly make the correction you suggested and the target breaks.

Don't ask me why, if I can see where the barrel is going to shoot by looking at it over a kid's shoulder I cannot see it if I am looking at my own barrel -- I can only guess.  I just know I cannot do it (though not for lack of trying), and I have never known anyone who can.
 
You should train your students to read their breaks.  Some people (like Neil Winston) have claimed that it is impossible to read target breaks, that is, to tell from the break of the clay whether most of the shot pattern was in front or behind, or above or below, when it passed through. Neil thought it might look like the back end of the clay got sheared off, but it might actually have been the front end, or whatever.
 
But once you get adept at seeing where the barrel is going to shoot when the trigger gets pulled, you will find that your reading of clay breaks is verified by where you saw the barrel about to shoot. You saw the barrel shoot behind, and sure enough the back end of the target got sheared off. I have seen that prediction get verified by the target break literally tens of thousands of times. People can believe what they want about reading breaks, I know that it can easily be done, and I teach every student to not only watch the clay until it breaks, but to read the break. It will in many cases inform you that you nearly shot too far in front (or behind, or over, or under) of the target, which advises you to adjust your move accordingly.
 
That does not mean that a break never lies. At times a couple of pellets will crack the spinning clay but the piece does not fly off until later in the rotation, from the centripetal force. However, the experienced observer will usually detect the slight difference in timing and know what happened. Similarly, I have numerous times seen people shoot so far ahead of a clay that the plastic wad ambled up and smashed the clay. However, again, the timing (between the report and the break) was all wrong, making what happened obvious.
 
Being able to see where the student is shooting is also the best way to fit a gun, far superior to having them shoot a pattern plate. In fact, I never let a student go anywhere near a pattern plate, because all it shows is where they are shooting when they aim, not where they will shoot flying. For the cross-dominant shooter it produces completely bogus information, because when they consciously aim they see the barrel with their left eye and shoot way to the left of where they will shoot when they do not aim, at least, once their subconscious has been trained.


 
 
    Bending a shotgun stock with heat.

Gun-Fit

You constantly hear about how important gun-fit is to a shotgunner, if they want to hit targets. Well, yes and no.
I cringe whenever I see an instructor staring up the barrel of a new shooter's gun in the clubhouse before the lesson starts, to see if their eye is in the optimal position relative to the gun.  For one thing that is the absolutely wrong message to be imparting to the beginner  --  that where the GUN shoots, as opposed to where THEY point it, is what is important. The first several sessions their mount is so inconsistent that they will still be off most of the time even if they did have a perfectly fitted gun.  (I also hate to see an instructor cavalierly violating the rule that all guns should be treated as if loaded by have the student aim their shotgun at the instructor's eye.  It is poor form, to say the least.)

But even more to the point, "proper" gun-fit is simply neither achievable nor necessary at all in the first few sessions, other than the stock cannot be way too long or short. Kids' gun-fit can be less than optimal in the first few months and they will do as well as they would with a perfectly fitted gun. I have team guns of varying dimensions, and I just give each beginner whichever gun is closest to the correct stock-length for them. All my team guns are all semi-auto Beretta 20 gauges with the stock-bolt shims set to provide neutral cast and the highest comb possible.
 
And remember, you should be teaching them to shoot "by feel." Who cares where the gun shoots? They should just learn where it shoots and then point it there. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Fit is of course something I would not dream of ignoring for my own shooting, but I am shooting more challenging targets than the beginning kid. As the kid progresses to shooting those more challenging targets, I pay more and more attention to his gun-fit. If he is consistently shooting high or low, I will see it and adjust his gun accordingly. If his right eye is not centered left and right on a fairly thin-combed stock like a Beretta 20-gauge semi-auto, you probably need to adjust his mount posture, not change the stock.

 
 

 
COACHING THROUGH EYE DOMINANCE ISSUES -- STEP BY STEP
  
After the safety and rules discussion, I take the beginner to Skeet Low 7 and let them do a couple of practice mounts and dry-fires with a chosen Beretta. No leaning back, no laying the head over on the stock. Slight lean forward, get the recoil pad into the pocket nature gave us just for shotgunning and bring the comb up until it just touches the underside of the cheekbone, with very light pressure. I have already let them watch an experienced kid shoot a couple of Low 7's. I put them in the station and show them a target, tell them to stay away from the trap window, and then tell them the following:
 
Some people see their shotgun barrel to the target, what I call "aiming" it, because it is a very logical thing to do. However, it is FALSE LOGIC -- it does not work on many targets. I am going to teach you a method that will enable you to break any target. It is also a much more fun way to shoot than aiming.
 
You are going to learn to shoot targets "by feel," without ever noticing, visually, where your barrel is at any point while shooting. In fact, it is critical that you do not allow yourself to ever visually notice the barrel, at all, if you want to become very good with shotgun. You are going to learn to make the gun shoot wherever you want it to by FEEL alone.
 
However, you were not born with your hands knowing how to point a shotgun at a particular spot by feel, so we are going to have to teach your hands that. Don't worry, though, because it is easy to do and kind of fun learning.
 
You have to read the targets well in order to hit them. That means you have to see precisely what the speed of the target is (and that is constantly changing), what angle it is to you and what line it is rising and falling on. Seeing the target clearly, but at the same time seeing it against its background will help you with reading it well.
 
Now, when you shoot I want you to see the target (I call it "acquiring" it) the instant it appears out of the trap-house. It will be a blur at first but you will quickly move your eyes to it and turn it into a sharp, clear clay. The instant you see it as a blur (but not before) I want you to begin moving your gun to it. At the same time you are moving the gun to it you will be reading it, and as soon as it becomes sharp and clear I want you finish your move and to pull the trigger without hesitation. It is a little tricky getting your move to the target to coincide with the blur's conversion to a sharp and distinct clay, but you will easily get that down with practice.
 
I want you to shoot the bird before it gets to that first stake out there. Before you call pull you are going to position your gun close to where you plan to break it, leaving yourself to have to move the barrel in the same direction the target is moving, and on the same line the target is on. I want you be ready to POUNCE on it with your eyes when it comes out, and your move of the gun should be quick but SMOOTH to the bird. Find the spot where you think you will first pick up the blur and freeze your eyes on that spot right before you call pull. Do not move your eyes until the blur appears, then lock them onto the target.
 
The target will pass your gun and you will move to it. I want you to pull the trigger the instant you get to the bird, and remember to try to get there as soon as you can see it clearly.  You are going to miss it, most likely, but that is okay. After you miss, I will tell you where you were, because I can see exactly where every one of your shots goes.
 
Now, NO PEEKING at the barrel after the target flies, just read the target and FEEL the gun go to the breakpoint. Move quickly and pull the trigger the instant you get there.  Do not visually notice the barrel at all because if you do that we will not be training your hands to put the gun where you want it to shoot, which is our main goal now.
 
[I let them do a couple of practice mounts and pick their insertion point; then I load the gun with one round and remind them to keep their finger off the trigger until they have the gun fully mounted and everything looks safe.]
 
Okay, call "pull" when you are ready for it.
 
[They call pull, shoot and miss.]
 
Okay, you were a little to right (or whatever) of that one. I am going to give you the same target again, and this time I want you to make a correction by FEELING, NOT SEEING, FEELING the gun go to a spot just a little to the left of where you shot last time. Do NOT see the correction, feel it, while seeing nothing but the target and its background.
 
And so on, repeating until we get success.
 
The right-eye dominants will be close to the target, usually, and I can pretty easily walk them into breaking the bird. However, weak right-eye dominants may at first cross-fire at least some of the time, because you have not trained their subconscious which image to use yet.  It is not a problem. So long as they can refrain from consciously seeing the barrel, their subconscious will quickly train itself to always use the image from their right eye to direct the barrel.  (Actually it uses both, but the image from the off-eye is just a backup.)
 
The cross-dominants, however, will cross-fire every time at first, meaning they will shoot 2-3 feet to the left of Low 7. They will do that even if they are obeying my command to not let themselves see anything but the target. Again, their subconscious does not yet know which image to use for aiming (and yes, the lightning-fast subconscious does AIM the barrel, you just better not try to do it consciously), so it may pick the dominant one. It is not a big deal.


 
If after encouragement to "feel" the gun shoot more to the right (to correct for hitting to the left) they continue to shoot way left, I tell them, Okay, I want you to do something for me -- I want you to show me you can deliberately miss the next target two feet to the right of it. They say okay, and then shoot the same spot as before.
 
I see that, and tell them they shot the same spot, and that I am serious about them missing to the right by two feet. It may take a few more misses and some more cajoling from me, but eventually they make themselves "feel" the gun shoot 2 feet to the right, and crush the target.
 
"WHOA! What just happened?"
 
I have them repeat a few times, continuing to feel like they are going to miss to the right. They are happy because they are crushing targets. I let each of the other kids shoot a few targets, and when the beginner cycles back I remind him that he needs to try to miss to the right. He does, and we revel in the success. The parent watching and listening to all this wonders how in the world this is ever going to work on crossers, but they need not worry, it is temporary.
 
I then tell the kid, Look, it is not your fault but this gun is not shooting where you think you are pointing it (I blame it on the gun, and they do not know any better). For the time being you are going to have to feel like you are shooting to the right of where you need to be. They shrug and do it (shooting only Low 7's) and have a lot of success for the rest of the day. The other kids I may move to station "6.5" and shoot the low house from there, but I keep the cross-dominants on station 7. I have all beginners avoid the high house because if they have time to aim, they will.
 
At the end of the day I tell the cross-dominant kid that if they want to keep hitting targets they are going to have to keep feeling like they are missing to the right for a while, but only for another session or two, and then they will be able to just feel like they are shooting right at the target and they will break it. (And that has never proven to be untrue.) They are fine with that.
 
And by the next session, or the one after, they no longer have to feel like they are missing to the right.  The whole time they think they are learning to shoot "by feel."  What is really happening is we are training their subconscious to use the two images, and especially the one from the non-dominant eye (the one over the rib), which the subconscious has no problem doing once you show it which is the correct image by getting the kid to break some targets.  The subconscious is a powerful thing. They are soon just seeing the target and crushing it, so long as you keep them seeing only the target and not the barrel.
 
If I had not seen this with my own eyes many times I would not believe it.  After 3 or 4 weeks it is as if we had somehow converted them to strongly right-eye dominant. You cannot, of course, change a person's eye dominance, but you can make it not matter.
 
Then you just spend a few years getting them to shoot faster and harder targets, without ever seeing their barrel, and before you know it you've got a real shooter on your hands.  In this regard, the cross-dominants are sometimes the EASIEST to turn into very good shooters, because they quickly learn that if they notice their barrel at all, they miss.  They want nothing to do with "aiming."  The kids who are right-eye dominant continually want to experiment, and see if aiming doesn't help their shooting.  They want to do that for a long time, but at some point they realize that it is a loser's way to shoot, and never (or almost never) try it again.
 
Now, is it possible that Suzy Balogh, Nora Ross or Alessandra Pirelli would still shoot better with only one eye than they would have with two, even if I had coached them from Day One when they were little girls? 
Absolutely. I doubt it, frankly, but it is certainly possible. I don't know how all this stuff works, I only know what I have seen. But it is obvious to me that regardless of what is best for Suzy Balogh or anyone else, there are thousands of beginners, and especially females, who are getting their lenses taped when they should not be. A lot of people have the idea that because Suzy won a gold medal in the Olympics shooting one-eyed that anyone should be fine shooting that way. It is ridiculous to think that one eye can read targets as well as two all the time.  One eye can do as well some of the time, perhaps even most of the time, but it will always disappoint on some targets.
 
ATA trap great Phil Kiner told me once that he has moved several people to their left shoulder due to their eye dominance, but he has hardly had a person do that who did not need to have a patch on their *right* lens. Moving to the weak shoulder is not a panacea. If you are going to do it, it is, of course, better to do it before they have shot many rounds. But the people I have personally seen do it never got very good. On the other hand, I have never left the gun on a cross-dominant's strong shoulder and regretted it later. I have never even suspected they might have done better off the other shoulder. None has ever had to patch a lens later.
 
I don't like moving them to their weak side because, for one thing, shotgunning at high levels requires exquisite timing of the trigger-pull, and I think the strong hand has better timing than the weak hand.
 
But I have gotten such good results by having cross-dominants shoot off their strong side TWO-EYED that I see no reason to not try that first. The kids shooting that way get very good quickly and enjoy their shooting very much. A determined and driven shooter may be able to learn to shoot off her left shoulder and be comfortable that way, but most beginners will not. Many will give up shooting if you try to make them shoot with the "wrong" hand.
 
And let's face it, regardless of how well a kid shoots, very few will have the other 49 things it takes to become a national champion. Even if the cross-dominant would shoot slightly higher scores in a few years if they shot off their weak shoulder, it is highly unlikely they are ever going to need those few extra birds, because they are not going to be competing in national events, no matter how much you or I might like to see them doing that.
  
There is a whole, wonderful world of shotgunning waiting in your subconscious, if only you can get your conscious mind out of its own way and keep both eyes always on the target.

 

Ralph Cushman

Head Coach

Birchwood Young Guns

Birchwood, Alaska

al.bonkers49@gmail.com