Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Advice for shooters that are left eye dominant

I agree with Utah708 and others who recommend using the correct LH equipment. My wife is right handed and left eye dominant. She has a LH bolt and a lever and shoots both naturally and well and i would term her an occasional hunter and shooter. My cousin, who has hunted and shot all of his life, shoots RH bolts and although well practiced, is never in a good shooting position, although he is well practiced enough to make it work. Practice can overcome...but why fight it, the right equipment is out there.

Yep.

Close the left eye or use an eye patch.

Keep the solutions simple.

Scoped or with peep sight, probably not much difference in how well he would shoot either handed. If he's right handed, he probably can work a right handed bolt better and faster. I'm fairly ambidextrous - hit a baseball or softball about the same from either side and comfortable shooting shotgun from either side, but I'm definitely a righty when working a bolt action, so I use right handed bolt rifles even though I'm left eye dominant.

For shotguns, handguns, and defense rifles that he might need to just point and pull the trigger instead of aim, definitely have him shoot left handed if left eye dominant. For bolt action rifles with scope or peep sight, let him try both left and right and see what his preference is.

Ditto. Being 78 years old I have shot with my right eye for over 60 years.In hunting, competition (handgun and rifle), and plinking. Yep shot gunning gets tedious

I'm right-handed and have been shooting since I was 5 and I'm now 72. In those days not much was said about eye dominance and shooting. I couldn't hit the side of a barn until I finally figured out for myself that I was left eye dominant. I started shooting left-handed at about age 10 and it is so natural now that shooting right-handed is a handicap for me. For bolt actions, I leave the rifle at my left shoulder and work the bolt with my right hand (when shooting at game). When shooting shotguns I try to keep both eyes open and used to shoot sporting clays in the high 80s about 20 years ago. I do own an LH Mauser 3000L but I never use it. Handgun shooting is still problematic for me. A red dot sight works great for me on a handgun with both eyes open but that option is only for a certain few handguns.

I’ll take a hard pass on that.

There will be varying degrees of dominance. I'm visually ambidextrous. If a pistol is in my left hand I shoot with my left eye, if it's in my right hand, I use my right eye. The tests for eye dominance fail with me ... inconsistent results. I shoot rifles mostly right handed simply because most rifles are right handed and that's what I've practiced the most.

I'd suggest everyone should become somewhat proficient with their weak side / weak eye, don't just practice the stuff that works well, so that if you're somehow disabled / incapacitated, you have a practiced, familiar fallback. (I also taught myself to fly fish left handed.)

I'd find a left handed bolt action .. maybe you have a left handed friend .. and let him try that. And try a right handed setup. See if there's any difference for him. You might be looking for trouble where these is none.

Cross over stock?

EYEGLASSES

Kids are notorious-adults sometimes also-for screwing up the many often used eye dominance tests, which themselves are open to interpretation....Unless verified by someone who knows how, I wouldn't worry about it right now....

Eye dominance for most falls into a degree of eye dominance...and most are not 100% either way....

This ^

I am a lefty and started out with right handed bolt actions as their were no lefty bolt guns. My first lefty bolt gun was a Remington 700 FS in .270 and I never shot a righty again. My son fortunately is also a lefty so I started him out with T/C Pro hunter single shots and now he shoots a Tikka
'lefty" in 6.5 Creedmoor. During the last 40 years I have used Remington pump rifles, lever guns and mostly single shots so there are other choices out there for south paws.

If I was buying a lefty bolt gun for my grandson I would be on the hunt for used Ruger American RAR in left hand or a Savage lefty bolt gun. As a grandfather start your grandson out right....or I mean LEFT.

As I said before I am right handed and left eyed...............

AND, at 66, I am not going to pick up the most dangerous tools in my tool box and try to use them with the wrong hand......................

But that's just me......

My hats off to all you guys that can wipe your butt just as well with either hand..................

For safety and efficiency reasons, shoot with ones dominant eye. That way one can keep both eyes open. Lots of choices in actions. Pumps, levers, falling blocks, break actions, semi autos, etc go both ways.

Also, for sure assess eye dominance in ones kid before they ever shoulder a firearm.

Im right handed but left eye dominant. I've always used LH bolt rifles or levers.

This what I do as well. I know it's not ideal, but I get by.

A few comments:

Per usual, a lot of the comments here are how ONE person dealt with the problem personally, but in my experience that's very much like ONE person saying they have no problem handling the recoil of, say, a .330 Winchester or even.378 Weatherby Magnum, so therefore everybody else should be able to do the same thing.

Humans vary in many ways, and a couple of the ways involve both the degree of eye dominance, and the degree of "handedness." With many of us, especially in middle age, eye dominance can become erratic. And people can be strongly right-handed, left-handed or ambidextrous--or anywhere in between.

Have talked to (and sometimes been trained by) a lot of professional shooting instructors, for both rifles and shotguns, and due to my work have observed quite a few other shooters (and even helped some) myself. In general, if the shooter's a beginner, they should try both sides and find what's most comfortable, though very young beginners can more easily adapt to shooting "with" their eye dominance, partly because they haven't been habituated to shooting from one side or the other. This is often more desirable is the shooter has any interest in shotgunning..

One interesting example is a cousin of mine, six years younger than I am, who's strongly left-eye dominant but close to ambidextrous--though in training closer to right-handed, because before he even started shooting he used a lot of tools designed for right-handers for wood-working. He made do with one of the family bolt-actions when he started hunting big game at 12, naturally a right-hand rifle, since nobody else in the family was left-eye dominant (or even left-handed). He didn't do to well, and quit hunting in his mid-teens until his late 20s, largely due to that problem.

Then he started to hunt again, partly because I moved near him. He used a right-hand bolt rifle, but practiced more with it, and killed a deer with me. He decided he liked hunting then, but still preferred shooting shooting left-handed due his strong eye dominance. I found a used left-hand Remington 700 .30-06 for him, and he's been very happy with it, because it's more comfortable to shoot with. And he shoots it well.

And that's just one example of why we shouldn't make any firm conclusions of what's "better" for a cross-dominant. Instead, we should be open to what feels and works best for the individual shooter. Right now I'm helping a friend with his 10-year-old daughter, who'll start hunting this coming fall. She's left-eyed and right-handed, and we're going to start her with a .243 Winchester H&H Handi-Rifle that Eileen used a little around 15 years ago. Obviously it can be used from either side, and we'll find out which side his daughter prefers, instead of assuming which side she should shoot from.

Agree completely....and then some.

In addition, eye dominance with shotguns is often an issue because the barrel gets in the way....Have a bird fly across the sky, with no shotgun in hand, point at it and the brain will figure out where to point and almost perfectly. With no barrel eye dominance is not an issue..

Which is why you are seeing some of today's top shotgunners shooting with their head almost off the stock...It helps get the barrel out of the way and eye dominance becomes less of an issue. The are shooting over the barrel rather than down it..

And some--often hunters--are using red-dot or other optically aligned sights, rather than looking along the barrel. This has worked for a long time, as Bill Weaver proved with 1x (non-magnifying) scopes decades ago.

Which is one reason I prefer variables of 1x to 1.5x on the bottom end for my drillings. When hunting big game the scope's on the lowest magnification, and if a bird flushes at close range the scope works fine. And if a longer-range shot occurs on big game, there's usually time to crank the scope up.

Something I didn't think to mention in my earlier post is that, at least for me, when using a rifle scope (with magnification) with both eyes open the eye looking through the scope becomes the "dominant" eye.