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

by Ralph Cushman

[I have tried here to avoid redundancy and including anything that was not important, but this still turned out to be a "book" instead of an "article."  It is also pretty technical stuff, so skimming will not work well.  I suggest multiple reading sessions to get through it.]

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 unique -- I take kids who are right-handed but have strongly dominant left eyes (or vice-versa, "cross-dominant" in other words) and teach them how to be excellent shotgun shooters shooting off their dominant (hand) side with both eyes wide open at all times, and with no tape on their lens or any other vision-blocking/impairing ("occlusion") device.

The vast majority of professional instructors and coaches say that cannot be done, that it is a waste of time to try.  In fact, I know of only one other shotgun coach/instructor in the world (Nick Penn of England) who says what I say, that it can easily (and should!) be done.

The vast majority of instructors simply do not know how to teach a cross-dominant beginner to shoot that way.  Once you do know how, it is actually pretty easy.

Confession:  I am conflicted writing this.  One the one hand it does not bother me if adult shotgun shooters want to go on missing way more targets than they should.  In fact, I kind of like it -- it makes my kids look better.  But on the  other hand, I grew tired of watching for years as kid after kid got messed up (many permanently) by some well-meaning instructor putting tape on their shooting glasses or having them shoot wrong-handed because the kid was cross-dominant.  Once I figured out that was unquestionably wrong I had to speak out.

High level shotgunning is a game of timing, and in particular the timing of the trigger-pull.  That is more true with some target presentations than others, but it is true in every discipline.  I believe most people will do much better if they are trying to achieve that exquisite timing with their dominant hand.  Once you have relegated all the "eye dominance" concerns to the waste-bin, where they belong, there is no reason to not put the dominant hand on the trigger (assuming normal function, of course).  Moreover, I have never seen anyone switch to their weak shoulder and then shoot at anywhere near the level they would have if they had employed what I teach instead.

I used to give eye dominance tests to beginners just like other coaches/instructors do.  If they were right-handed but tested cross-dominant I would tell them they either needed to shoot with the gun on their left shoulder, 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 shot championship scores with both eyes open and the gun on their strong side (sporting clays great Scott Robertson and Olympic medalist Todd Graves, for examples).  I determined that I would figure out how and why they were able to do that, when so many say it is impossible.  In time I did figure it out, through trial and error, and wrote this article 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 he had switched to his weak shoulder or occluded.

*********************************************************************************

ADDED 05/15/2023:

INTERVIEW WITH BAYNE HORNE -- OUR 'PODCAST'

Bayne is one of the very top sporting clays shooters in the U.S. even though he shoots R-handed with both eyes on the target at all times, while being strongly L-eye dominant.  He started shooting clays 13 years ago, when he was 47 years old, and he has a full-time job running his farm in South Texas.

And yet, at the 2022 NSCA Nationals Bayne took 6th place out of 628 M-Class shooters in the  Main Event, won Veteran National Champion, and took 3rd place in the 5-Stand.  His 184/200 in the 2023 U.S. Open Main Event was only 6 birds off the best score shot.  At the 2023 Browning/Briley in Houston Bayne was HOA in the Prelim with a 98/100.  He regularly outshoots the biggest names in the sporting world.

You want to become a top sporting shooter?  Bayne generously tells you how to do it, and you do not have to be young, have eagle-eyes or shoot a bazillion targets.  You can even be strongly cross-dominant, like he is.  What you cannot do (if you ever want to get really good) is to shoot the wrong way -- you cannot notice your barrel in your peripheral vision while shooting -- the mistake the vast majority of the people shooting make.

Bayne contacted me after stumbling into this blog page on an Internet shotgun forum in early 2023.  We instantly hit it off because up until that point each of us thought he was the only person in the country saying what we do about "eye-dominance" and "barrel-awareness."

Enjoy!  Interview with Bayne 5-13-23

Bayne on NSCA's "Team USA" in 2014 (far left) with Mike Wilgus, Derrick Mein, Gebben Miles and Bill McGuire, with Zach Keinbaum as alternate.  They won the gold!

*********************************************************************************

10/29/2023 UPDATE!!!!  --  Today Bayne took 2nd Place in the NSCA 2023 National Championship Main Event in San Antonio.  No 60-year old has ever accomplished anything like that.  No cross-dominant/strong side shooter has ever accomplished anything like that.  If you have "eye dominance" issues Bayne is definitely someone you will want to listen to.

*********************************************************************************

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," "measuring" or shooting with "barrel-awareness."  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.

The second way is to shoot seeing the BTR, but only in the subconscious, historically often 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.  Indeed, most people have no idea what subconscious vision is, or how one would employ it.

The great majority of all 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 for 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 ("he" being shorthand for "he or she," of course) demonstrates that his off eye ("off" referring to the eye not lined up with the top-rib) is directing the shotgun, near universal consensus has quickly declared him "cross-dominant" and authoritatively moved to "correct" the problem by preventing his off eye from seeing the gun or by moving the gun to the side the dominant eye is on.

It is still going on to today.  Nearly every shotgun instructor anywhere is still routinely giving eye dominance tests to new students and, when the cross-dominant beginner refuses to shoot off his weak shoulder, telling the beginner he simply must either tape the lens in front of the off eye or wink the off eye.  It is almost always the wrong thing to do, but don't try to tell them that!

    "A hell of a lot of people, Dutch, just 

    can't stand to be wrong."

Most people reading this article have had what they were sure were "eye dominance issues" at least at times.  Some will roll their eyes 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.

But to these skeptics, let me pose a question that puzzled me for a long time:  how are some strongly cross-dominant shooters able to win world championships and Olympic medals shooting two-eyed strong-shoulder?

A great example is Scott Robertson, one of the very best sporting clays and exhibition shooters ever.  In the 2023 NSCA National Championship Main Event Scott placed 32nd out of 648 Master Class entrants.  He was interviewed in 2021 on Justin Barker's Shotgun Sports USA podcast, which currently can be heard at:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJg_Q0PVkJA

(YouTube substitutes links at times so if the above link does not work do a search for "YouTube Shotgun Sports Robertson" to find the new one.)

The discussion of Scott's eye dominance history starts at 1:24:30 of the interview.  He says when he started shooting at age 8-9 he was "horribly left eye dominant . . . that he shot a zero on his first round of trap . . . hit one out of the next 25," and only got that one by holding over the house and blasting without attempting direction when the bird appeared.

He says his dad, a respected shotgun instructor, quickly figured out he was left eye dominant and so from age 8 to 12 Scott shot with a piece of tape on his left lens, but at around age 12 he began to do just fine shooting doves without any occlusion or winking.   He left the tape off and never looked back.  Scott explained how he thought it worked:

"What we learned is that it is muscle-memory.  If you are a left eye dominant shooter you will always be left eye, but that doesn't mean you will always have to have a piece of tape.  You have to train your brain to know which sight-picture to use, and it takes between 5,000 and 10,000 rounds.  A guy just getting into sporting clays might shoot 10,000 rounds in 6 months, and then he is over it.  You can train out of it."

The problem with Scott's simple and encouraging explanation is that there are hundreds if not thousands of people, myself included, who have put tape on their lens and then shot 10,000 - 25,000 rounds every year for many years only to find that when they removed the tape the old "left eye taking over" problem quickly came back, often worse than ever.

And yet, Scott certainly knows which is his dominant eye, and he describes himself later in the interview as still being "severely left eye dominant."  So how was he able to simply lose the tape after a few years and go on to win 14 National Event Sporting Clays Championships, 3 World Championships, etc., as if cross-dominance was nothing?

The answer is, Scott is absolutely correct that the left eye dominant shooter can "train his brain to know which sight picture to use," but he left out a critical component.  Scott undoubtedly converted to purely subconscious aiming of his barrel when he was just a kid, probably without even realizing it.  That is the sine qua non to enabling the cross-dominant shooter to shoot two-eyed strong-shoulder.

But the lesson to be drawn from Scott's story is, it can be done.  Even more to the point, start the cross-dominant beginner out shooting the right way, with exclusively subconscious aiming, and he can be shooting very well two-eyed strong-shoulder in only a few months.  I know because I have done it with 11-14 year olds.  It has yet to fail to work.

I discovered through years of experimenting with kids on my shooting teams 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 to have permanent eye dominance "issues"  --  if you can get them to shoot without consciously noticing the BTR, which is how anyone 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, with doing the right things with their eyes being only one of them. But the beginner youth who starts 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.

And you can do that even if you are not yourself a champion shooter and have little or no experience with eye dominance in shotgun shooting.

    Dick 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.)

Floundering in the Wilderness

The seed of my enlightenment was planted by the great U.K. shotgun instructor Roger Silcox, though it would take years to grow. One of our local gun-club owners got Roger to come to Alaska in the 1990's a few times selling shooting instruction. The first thing Roger did every time with a new group of students (most of whom were experienced shooters) was to gather them together and have all who had tape on his shooting glasses remove it. Get him unwound after dinner and he would tell you that the whole "eye dominance" bugaboo was mostly a farce, that almost no one should be closing their off-eye or taping a lens to shoot a shotgun.

I thought Roger just did not understand my problem, which to me was obviously not something that could simply be ignored. I discarded his advice and went on shooting "patched."

About that same time I got roped into coaching some beginner kids and women.  I took my coaching responsibilities seriously. I read books and watched videos on how to shoot. I gave my students eye dominance tests and put tape on their lenses if they were cross-dominant. I fitted their guns to them. But despite my sincere and studied efforts, almost none of the people I coached ever got very good.

It seemed obvious that the most important aspect of "shooting flying," as it used to be called, was what you saw with your eyes, but I had the distinct, nagging feeling there was some major aspect to that I was missing. I read and watched articles and videos by Vicki and Gil Ash, and what they said gradually made me suspect Mr. Silcox had actually known what he was talking about after all.

After years of frustration with our own shooting, a shooting buddy and I decided to try just ignoring eye dominance and focusing on the target and shooting it without ever seeing the barrel. It was very difficult to do at first, because we had both been confirmed measurers for years. One of us would shoot and the other would try to guess where the shot had gone. It was the blind leading the blind, but an inescapable truth began to crystalize over time -- the less we saw of our barrels, the better we shot.  It slowly became clear that we were on to something.  I decided to incorporate it into my coaching of beginners.

I quit giving new shooters eye-dominance tests. If I saw them cross-firing (meaning using the image from their left eye to steer the gun as if the left eye were the one aligned with the rib, resulting in the shot going way to the left of the target) I knew they were probably cross-dominant, but I tried to find a way to coach them through it. This was not an easy task because I had no guide.  The vast majority of shotgun coaches and instructors do not believe it can be done. I was roundly criticized by other coaches for even trying.

But after a few years of experimenting, I pretty much had it down. I was able to take even cross-dominant people and get them to shooting just fine off their strong shoulder TWO-EYED.

How?  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.

 

   Subconscious shooting should not be 

   confused with unconscious shooting.

THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

The subconscious is the part of your mind which operates without your awareness and over which you do not have active control. It is not yet well understood by science, but we keep getting more hints, for example, the phenomenon of "blindsight." A few years ago it was discovered that some people who are blind and can see absolutely nothing consciously can somehow see objects with their subconscious mind looking through their blind eyes. From this we know that the subconscious uses images from the eyes the conscious mind cannot see.

https://www.lifeintherightdirection.com/subconscious-vision-real/

Though it does not involve blindsight, that is the principal scientific basis for what I am about to say here -- that in "aiming" a shotgun your subconscious can see a whole world of information, at incredible speeds, that your conscious mind cannot see, or at least cannot see fast enough to aim a shotgun well with.

We speak of our "reflexes," but when a surprise object comes careening toward your eye and you unthinkingly blink to minimize the anticipated impact damage, it was not muscle reflexes that caused you to do that, it was your subconscious. It had your eyes closed before your conscious mind had even begun to comprehend that your eyes might need closing. We need not be afraid of letting our subconscious handle our shotgun aiming duties. Indeed, it turns out we are fools to do otherwise.

"The subconscious is a powerful thing."

The problem, however, is that the conscious mind is dominant.  If you are consciously seeing something (such as a shotgun barrel in your peripheral vision), then those two images (one from each eye) are the ones the brain will use exclusively.  Your brain will ignore the images it is seeing subconsciously.  To utilize subconscious images of something you have to not be seeing it consciously.

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 seamless image, enabling us to see three-dimensionally and with depth-perception. We can notice what each of our eyes is seeing with our conscious mind if we wish to, but we do not have to. We can if we wish just let our subconscious control everything and 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 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 concerning 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 stronger and more clear image, but that is an illusion caused by the fact that the non-dominate eye is seeing the finger in its periphery.  Line the finger up with the non-dominate 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 is in alignment with the eye on the same side the gun is shouldered on, regardless of which eye it is.  It matters not to them which of their eyes 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 fast enough to be of any use in shooting flying targets.  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, leaving the shooter complaining that his "left eye took over."

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.

However, that can be accomplished only when the shooter does not allow either eye to (consciously) notice the barrel.  He must make his barrel "disappear."

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 saying:  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 100 times 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.

Those simultaneous images, if consciously noticed, are confusing to a shooter, and utilizing them with his subconscious is not something the beginner learns to do 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 his shooting a lot of targets while never (consciously) noticing 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 target presentation.  Every time he misses, his subconscious learns something 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 even try to get them to shoot without consciously seeing the barrel.  Even worse, many coaches/instructors teach that the shooter should see his barrel in his peripheral vision in order to "measure" the necessary lead.  Once a person starts down that road "eye-dominance" problems are inevitable for all but the most strongly synch-dominant, and taping or winking will be required.

The typical shooting instructor (even one with a high certification) counter-productively instructs beginners and intermediate shooters in terms of "sight pictures."  That phrase should never be used.  The natural inclination for the learner is from the outset to try to aim the barrel at the target anyway, so without strong admonitions against such noticing of the barrel, he does, enthusiastically, and the bad habit has started incubating.  Talking to them about "sight pictures" will be understood as looking at, or at least noticing, the BTR.  So will talking to them about "barrel widths" of lead needed to break a target unless (or using any other measurement device) you make it very clear they are not  to try to see that gap while shooting.

Even if the beginner is told to not "see" the barrel, there is an immediate obstacle to success  -- he does not know any other way to direct his barrel to shoot where he wants it to.  He has probably never even heard of subconscious aiming, and has no clue how it works even if he has heard of it.

He cannot (by definition) see what his subconscious is seeing.  He has no way of knowing if 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.  All but the most determined will require constant, proper coaching to learn to aim with only 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, but 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, and they will not want to shoot any other way.

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 brain was seeing the image from his off eye, it was that it was seeing it consciously, which resulted in his image processor (brain) ignoring the image from the right eye because the conscious mind works so slowly that it must pick one image or the other to analyze.  We know he saw it consciously because no one, not even a cross-dominant shooter, who restricts their viewing of the barrel to their subconscious ever says something like that.  They never feel like one eye has more "control" than the other, and indeed correctly assume they are viewing the target with both eyes equally, and simply "feeling" the gun go wherever it needs to.

Whenever one of my learners tells me he is "seeing the left side of the gun" I tell him, "Good -- that will remind you to stop letting yourself see the gun at all when you are shooting and instead 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 what to see.  The training does not happen without some work over months' time, but once trained, the subconscious never uses the "wrong" image to position (i.e., aim) the gun.  It never fails to use both images simultaneously and to steer the gun with the right one.  Even among my strongly cross-dominant students, I have never seen one cross-fire except when they were peeking at the barrel.

Edit:  If utilizing both images, including the one looking down the side of the gun, to aim the shotgun seems bizarre to you, listen to Bayne's description of his battle with cross-dominance in our first podcast, and to how in frustration he finally decided to just turn the aiming job over to his left eye.  What he was actually doing was turning the job over to his subconscious, which gleefully uses both images to steer the gun.

THE ONLY TRULY ACCURATE EYE DOMINANCE TEST

Most shooting instructors use the "aperture" test, where the student holds a CD or similar at arm's length and then brings it closer to their face.  However, any good optometrist will tell you the aperture test sometimes provides an incorrect analysis, for unknown reasons.

The test I have found to be 100% repeatable and reliable is having the new person shoot a reasonably well-fitting shotgun at going-away birds, without consciously seeing the barrel.  The left-eye-dominant person shooting right-handed will shoot 3-4 degrees off to the left every shot.  You can tell him he is "off to the left" and to try to shoot more to the right, but he will not be able to correct enough to hit the clay because the image he is seeing tells him he is already shooting too far to the right.

Per my calculations below, 4 degrees is off by about 3 feet at 15 yards and 6 feet at 30 yards, which is exactly what I have consistently observed when watching cross-dom's shoot Low 7 skeet or straight-away trap (ATA) targets (before their subconscious has been trained).

That is the only "eye dominance test" I ever give.

X-DOM ERROR CALCULATIONS

Assume the eyes are 2.5" apart for a youth (ave. is 2.95" for an adult) and 36" behind the front bead.  The X-dom will point the bead 2.5" to the right for every 3' distance from the eye.  90' / 3' x 2.5" = 75"

/ 12  =  6.25 feet off to the left at 30 yards

or         3.125 feet off to the left at 15 yards

or         2.08 feet off to the left at 10 yards

Convert to degrees:

A 30-yard shot creates a diameter of 60 yards, or 180'.

3.14 x 180' (diameter) = 565.2' circumference

divided by 360 = 1.57' per degree at 90' distance

6.25' / 1.57' = approximately 4 degrees off (at all distances)

In fact, no other eye-dominance test should ever be given for purposes of learning to shoot a shotgun.  Eye dominance ranges from very strongly left eye to very strongly right eye, and every thing in between, and you as instructor will very quickly be able to see exactly what their state is.  Talking to them about it  just gives them an inferiority complex concerning the issue.  Moreover, it is going to be completely immaterial in the long run anyway.

POINTING A SHOTGUN

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 said that, and 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 allegiance to them, in every shotgun shooting game (e. g., trap, skeet or sporting clays shoot) usually at least 75% of the participants can be seen aiming at at least some of their clays, if not all of them.  For most it is because they do not understand this critical distinction: "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 conscious 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.

The first step in teaching the left-eye dominant person shooting off his right shoulder is to get them to POINT their barrel without noticing it (consciously) in the slightest.

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. Your job as 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 how he moves 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 at the last instant.  He was violating Lord Ripon's admonition to "never check."

I tell the experienced shooter grappling with "eye dominance" issues, but who wants to lose the patch, that if he wants any hope of making the change 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 all of the aiming.  Of course, he looks at me funny because he had no idea that he even had the ability to aim with his 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 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 and pulling the trigger the instant you think it is there, without even one micro-second of hesitation upon arrival.  You consciously pull the trigger, but only when the subconscious tells your hand to.  When you are really doing it right it seens like the subconscious is pulling the trigger for you.

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 ever, 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, and with many it is extremely difficult to get them to quit looking at the barrel in the first place.  Moreover, 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.  So, discretion being the better part of valor, the instructor ignores the fact that the client is aiming talks to him about "hold points" and "feet positions."

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 on his very first attempt in a registered 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 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 primarily looking at the target.  They will say something like, "I see it all."  True, they can break a lot of targets that way, but they do not see some target nearly as well when they do that, and so misread it when they would not have misread it had they given it their undivided (conscious) attention.  They will never be in Dan Carlisle's "half a percent" because they have not committed the measuring/aiming job to their subconscious.

 

I have had kids who were very strongly left eye dominant. It was obvious as soon as they started shooting because they would consistently be off by about 4 degrees to the left.

 

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.

 

All this misguided "compensating for eye dominance" is driving people, and especially women, away from the shotgun sports. 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 90% of 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.

 

   Madelynn Bernau

 

It is also harming the shooting prospects of the women who are staying in. Someone in an Internet forum in 2021 posted a picture (above) of Madelynn Bernau, the young bunker shooter from Wisconsin who narrowly missed making the Women's Trap Final at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, and who, with Brian Burrows, won the gold medal in the Mixed Team Trap event there. The photo showed her in Tokyo covering her left eye with her left hand before mounting her gun, while staring out past the bunker, and she did it repeatedly in the video. 

 

There was a big debate over what Bernau was doing, and why, so one of the AMU guys in the discussion volunteered to ask her at Nationals (coming up a few weeks later) if she was doing that because she had an eye dominance problem. He later reported she had said she did not, but that "at one time she questioned herself and her dominance and the practice of covering her left eye helped her overcome that insecurity."

 

Excuse me, but it does not seem that insecurity concerning one's visual capability is a desirable thing to be experiencing while shooting in an Olympic finals. And I cannot help but wonder if it was hearing her whole shooting life that "75-90% of all women have an eye dominance defect that must be compensated for," when she is not compensating, that might have caused Maddy's "insecurity."

 

   Alesssandra Pirelli winning bronze in

   Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

Maddy 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.

 

Not all one-eyed shooters fall into the aiming trap. Neither Finland's Satu Makela-Numela nor Spain's Fatima Galvez do. I have watched videos of them for years and have never once seen either of them lose their brisk, aggressive move to the breakpoint. They are obviously not (consciously) noticing their barrel.  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 reading hard-to-see clays.

Stress makes the shooter doubt his ability. Doubt in his ability tends to make him aim. That is bad enough, but the patch on its own tends to make people aim. Aiming makes them miss, sooner or later. Watch the video of Corey Cogdell shooting in the 2016 Rome World Cup Finals. Near the end as the pressure mounts you can see her move to the target tailing off at the end, and she begins to drop birds. The two announcers, one of whom was a top Finnish bunker shooter, even commented disapprovingly that Corey had suddenly gotten "slow moving to the bird." Such unconscious slowing is done to enable the shooter to better consciously see whether the barrel is in the right spot to trigger. I am sure she did not realize she was doing it, but it is a classic form of conscious aiming. The result: Corey, a two-time Olympic bronze medal winner, lost to a young Australian who had never won a medal in a World Cup before.  Corey's patch had caused her to aim, and the aiming had cost her birds. What if Corey never should have been patched in the first place?

 

I first saw Corey when she was about 14 and signed up to shoot 4H at the club where I shoot.  In the beginning she gave indications of being left eye dominant so she got the tape, by one of those fellows who firmly believed that 90% of women need it.

 

When I saw Corey in 2014 at the Olympic Training Facility in Colorado she was shooting without the tape. I was amazed and asked her why. She said she felt like she had plateaued because of the patch, and was trying to lose it. She had not done well at the 2012 Olympics. Skeet and former double-trap shooter Kim Rhode had also shot the trap event (after winning gold in skeet) in London and had tied Corey's 68/75 with minimal prior practice. Corey needed to change something and suspected it was the tape, and I earnestly wished her luck.

 

It apparently was not to be. If you watch the 2016 Rome World Cup she has the patch back on.

 

I felt bad for Corey. She never should have been patched in the first place. She never should have been allowed to aim in the first place. That is the good coach's foremost duties -- to keep them shooting TWO-EYED and not measuring. Human nature tends toward measuring until the shooter has shot enough without consciously aiming to realize that aiming will cost you targets. Your job as coach is to get them to that point as quickly as possible.

 

   Kayle Browning winning silver in Tokyo.

But the times, they are a-changing. Alessandra Pirelli took bronze at the 2020 Olympics (held in 2021 due to Covid19), losing the silver to two-eyed American Kayle Browning, and the gold to two-eyed Slovakian Zuzana Stefecekova. Most ominous for the one-eyed shooters of the world was Pirelli's score in that final -- her 29 was a whopping 5 birds behind the two two-eyed medalists' 34's at the point when Pirelli was eliminated from the gold/silver match.

 

In the entire roster of 26 women trap shooters at the Tokyo Olympics, the only one-eyed shooters were the old soldiers -- the taped Pirelli and Makela-Numela and the winking Fatima Galvez (she opens her left eye as the target is launched but the eye has no chance of acquiring a good focus on a fast, moving clay in such a short amount of time). Galvez and Makela-Numela were way down in the standings.

 

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. 

 

One benefit to consciously seeing the BTR is that the shooter can often see where he missed (or thinks he can).  Without the BTR picture the shooter who removes the patch and just focuses on the target usually does not know where his miss went.  It is disconcerting.  For this reason it is critical that they have a coach in the beginning who can see and tell them where they are missing. They may need that coach for many sessions.  Eventually they will know, from what their subconscious saw, where they missed even though they did not consciously see the BTR at all, but for a while they will need a coach to tell them.  However, it is well worth the effort because they will eventually know where they missed far more accurately than the BTR-watcher ever will.

 

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 had ever 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.

 

But, let's humor absurdity for a moment and assume I am wrong, and that there are some women whose cross-dominance is so bad that they truly do shoot better with tape on their lens. (Satu and Fatima would certainly say that.) Why would you start a huge percentage of women out with tape on their lens, or shooting off their weak shoulder, either of which tends to drive them out of the shotgun sports, just because a few women are better off shooting those ways? Three out of 26 at the Tokyo Olympics does not sound like 90% to me. In my own experiments with dozens of female beginners over 15 years it is 0%.

I am not saying women are never cross-dominant --  some of them clearly have been.  I am saying I have not seen a female yet where it mattered, if they were taught from the beginning to shoot without consciously seeing the barrel.

 

It is actually pretty easy to coach them through their eye dominance issues, once you know how.

 

 

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.

 

In 2013 we were years away from having a bunker but I had some 13 - 14-year-old kids who wanted to go to the Junior Olympics and shoot bunker. So, we flew to Seattle and shot the Renton bunker for a long weekend a couple of times, and the rest of the time I just speeded up an ATA trap as much as possible, set it on wobble and trained them on that.

 

In spite of that obviously deficient training, one of the boys, Steven (at far right in the photo above), won the gold in his age group (J3 - U15) at the 2014 J.O. Not only that, but he shot 110 out of 125, which is a very good score for all but the very best bunker shooters in the country.  Of the 60 J2/U18 boys who competed that day, only 8 of them shot a better score than 110.  Of the 42 J1/U21 competing, only 12 shot better than 110.  To have done that at age 14 and without a bunker to regularly practice on was incredible.

   Grayson wins J. O. Gold

 

Everyone assumed Steven had been a fluke, that a diamond had just fallen into my lap, until another of my kids, Grayson, who was one year younger, did nearly the exact same thing the following year at the 2015 J.O., shooting a 108. Suddenly the folks at USA Shooting wanted to know what was in our water.

 

The secret was not in the water, it was in how those kids were taught to shoot from Day One -- "by feel," not by "sight pictures."  By the time they were 14 they understood, and were happy to live by, the rule that they must shoot without ever letting themselves (consciously) visually notice the barrel at all.

 

Steven won our state championships in (ATA) trap, skeet and sporting clays in 2021.  Grayson came in 7th at the 2021 bunker trap National Championship held in Michigan, after making the Army Marksmanship Unit earlier in the year, while still a junior.  The possibilities are limitless when you coach them to never (consciously) see their barrel.

 

Noticing your barrel does not keep you from being very good. It just keeps you from ever being as good as you could have been.

It is hard for most kids to refrain from noticing where their barrel is, because "checking" makes so much sense.  The best way to prevent it is to get the beginner to move to the target so quickly off the trap arm that he does not have time to aim. When they break a target, I will often tell them, now break it one foot closer to the trap. When they do that, I tell them one more foot closer, and so on. Soon they are shooting entirely in their subconscious, not noticing the barrel consciously at all, and smashing every target. It is a great way to instill the confidence that they can shoot very accurately even when they do not (consciously) see the barrel at all. 

 

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.

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. It is much easier 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 do not know. 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 where a shooter's barrel was about to shoot and then 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 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 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

 

Or is it "around" them -- I'm not sure, but my point is, a beginner can have a weakly dominant right eye, or even a strongly dominant left one, and if you coach them the right way from Day One their eye dominance will become immaterial. Here is how I do it.

 

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.

 

A few years ago highly ranked sporting clays shooter Katie Fox switched to her left shoulder under the tutelage of Olympian Dan Carlisle. She said it took her a year of practice to complete the conversion. She seems to be shooting at just about the same level as she was shooting right-handed, but maybe I am missing something. I will assume it was a good move.

 

But as trap great Phil Kiner told me recently, he has hardly had a person move the gun to their weak shoulder and then 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 have 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.

 

Perhaps Annie would grow up to break more birds if I had switched her to her left shoulder. But to me it is not worth trying. She is very happy shooting right-handed, and no one who sees her shooting now thinks there is anything wrong with it whatsoever.

 

And if subconscious shooting fixes cross-dominance in the strongly cross-dominant, just imagine what it does for the right-eye dominant who only occasionally experiences "left eye take-over."

 

There is a whole, wonderful world of shotgunning waiting in your subconscious, if only you can get your conscious mind out of its way.

 

Ralph Cushman

Head Coach

Birchwood Young Guns

Birchwood, Alaska

al.bonkers49@gmail.com