[exceltoexcel]

Pull the trigger…

Now this is the time when everything goes down.

BUT WAIT!

Before you pull that trigger, you better...

Site the target….

Those annoying sights. Which eye do I use? Which eye is dominate? What are those dots for? Why is everything so blurry?

Hey, something has to be hard, right?

Without a doubt, this is the probably the hardest part to learn, but once learned you will realize just how much everything else plays into your success or failure.

First, we need to determine which of your two eyes are dominate. If you own glasses put them on and make sure the room is brightly lit. Turn your hands back towards you and make a small triangle. You do this by overlapping your left hand fingers over your right hand fingers and thumbs. Pick a small object in the room; the red dot target on the wall is fine. Stand about 5-10 feet away with the triangle held arm length from you. Look through the triangle at arm’s length and see the dot. Bring your hands in to your face slowly, keeping the dot in the triangle. When the hands get about 1 inch, close one eye, then the other. One eye will see the dot; one will see the back of the hand. Now the following might sound silly but people make the same mistake all the time. The one that sees the dot is your dominate eye not the one you are squinting! For some reason people will close the one eye and see the dot and then surmise that the closed eye is the dominate eye. The dominate eye is the one that is open and sees the dot!

Now here is a test for your newly found dominate eye. With both eyes open point the finger of your dominate hand like it is a gun at the dot about 5-10 feet in front of you, do not think about it too much just point at the thing like you would normally, not like you’re aiming. Do not move, now close one eye, are you pointing at the object, if not, close the other eye, are you pointing at the object? The view through one eye will show that you are pointing to the opposite side of the open eye. I.e. if you are right eye dominate, upon closing your right eye and looking through your left, you will look like your pointing to the right of that target and vice versa. You determine your dominate eye by the one eye that when open, looks like you are pointing at the object. Keep doing these exercises until you have come up with one dominate eye. As a general rule of thumb, those that are right handed will be right eye dominate, those that are left, left eye dominate.

Now it is time to throw you a curve ball. There is no such thing as being one eye dominate unless you are seriously visually impaired in one eye. That is right, I said it! Turn your head about 45 degrees to the side, with your dominate eye away and use your non-dominate hand to point at the object. Typically you will use the non-dominate. Why? Because your dominate eye can’t see the object, it should be obscured by your nose since you rotated you head away from the target. This is a cheat for those looking to keep both eyes open but does not typically make for a good firing position.

We need to play with this a little to understand its nuances. Face the target squarely, you can do this sitting down, point to about 2 feet to the side of the target, on your non-dominate eye side with your non-dominate eye side hand. IE. I am right eye dominate so I point my left hand finger to about 2 feet left of the dot. Now look at the tip of your finger, while it is extended, really look at it. I want you to see your fingernail with the upmost clarity. Keep your eyes focused on the tip and move the finger horizontally towards the target slowly. Eventually, when you get close, you will notice that you see two targets. These should be out of focus because you are focusing on your fingertip! Stop when your finger is obscuring the left most dot/target. Close your right eye and bang you should now be pointing at the target with the left finger and the left eye is “dominate”. Open your right eye and focus on the fingertip again, move your finger until it covers the other dot/target to the right. Close your left eye. Bam, you are obscuring the right dot/target now and your right eye is now “dominate”.

What happened here? Well the whole point of these exercises is to make you aware of the nuances of your sight. You walk around all day resolving these focusing /eye dominate issues without ever noticing it but now you are having trouble. First off, we almost never try to focus on a near and far object at the same time; instead, we shift from one to the other. As you get older, this becomes even harder, as it takes more time to shift and focus. We are now faced with a dilemma; do we look at the sights or what we are shooting at? The answer is the sights. The reason is that the bullet follows the sights not the target! If only the bullet followed the target!
Some people will argue this section and with good reason, I am sure they will write to explain their position and you should hear them out.
All you have to do is pick one of the two visions you see of the target, either one will do! It doesn’t matter in the least, if you pick the right one then you are using your right eye to sight if you pick the left you are using the left to sight. Do you care or do you just want to hit the target?

The sights should be lined up dot to dot to dot in a horizontal line. I am guessing you already knew that. Some sights are different; they have a line, a figure 8 (which is supposedly the easiest sights to line up) etc… Read the firearm’s owners’ manual to find out how that picture should work. I try not to flip out about getting it perfect, you are going to move, your heart is beating, you body is sloshing that burrito around in your stomach, and your kidneys are processing that soda. You name it; it is going on inside there, so getting it perfect really demands a huge amount of practice and is beyond the scope of what we are trying to cover here.

In using the gun sites, the important part is that you must maintain the focus on the front sight! You probably noticed with the fingertip exercise, that you kept shifting your focus from the fingertip to the area around the target and the target itself. DO NOT DO THAT! It is hard to stop obsessing about the target but you must! You see the target, albeit not clearly, but it is there, and it is not going anywhere.
We should evaluate the sights themselves. Bring your “fake gun” up to your eyeballs and look at the sights! For the typical handgun, the sites are surprisingly far away from each other. Even at a few inches, we cannot maintain perfect focus on both of these objects at the same time! Well what are we going to do about that? It is simple; the back sites have a more dominate role in maintain the horizontal positioning of the gun relative to the target. While the front site itself dictates everything, horizontal and vertical! However without the rear sights you have nothing to judge the one point to. If I obscure the target with the front sight while looking through the gap in the rear, I am generally near the mark. I only need the rear sights as a reference not a leader. We now, while focusing on the front sights only, need to ensure that the ambient light around the front sight is equal both left and right or the front sight and uniform across the top. I do not actually need to focus on the rear sights at all. I am using them to only obscure light. Now this is general, advanced people have worked through this basic step and have other means at which to use these rear sights but already we have covered so much our heads are spinning. Because of this, we will leave it at that.

While gripping the gun normally, focus on the front sight and maneuver the gun to see the ambient light patterns I have described for you. Now close one eye. Has the picture changed? Are you now looking at the side of the gun? If so, then close the open eye and open the closed eye. Are you now looking through the sites properly? The eye your using to peer through the rear site into the front sight is (for now) your dominate eye. Eventually you will just know which one you are using by instinct; it will not require all of these steps. You now know which target to go for, it’s the one on the side of your dominate eye. I.e. I am looking through the sights with my right eye so I obscure the right target. Open both eyes, shoot with both eyes open if possible, this will give you an advantage over the squinters because squinting an eye causes all sorts of minor issues like fatigue and blurred vision as well as a loss of situational awareness and depth perception.

Oh my what a workout this is, you should try explaining this let alone typing it, it is far more painful than reading it . Play with this, try to use the right eye then try to use the left while keeping both open! This will help you better understand the issues at hand.
We are still not finished. Try this, hold the “fake gun”, at a distance just greater than the distance the slide moves back, close to the middle of your face in line with your nose. Focus at the dead back of the gun. While doing this you should be able to see two slides and two targets! I just had you do that so that you can see how both eyes are working to resolve one image!

RECAP…

We learned how to determine the dominate eye. How to sight the gun and which target to aim for.

Now we need to learn how to….