Yes, you can shoot with your non-dominant eye, but it comes with a measurable accuracy cost if you don’t compensate for it. A military study on rifle marksmanship found that 86.1% of shooters with matched hand and eye dominance qualified on the rifle, compared to just 56.5% of cross-dominant shooters. The good news: several proven techniques can close that gap significantly, and the best approach depends on whether you’re shooting a handgun, rifle, or bow.
How to Find Your Dominant Eye
Before adjusting anything, confirm which eye is actually dominant. The most common method is the Miles test: pick an object across the room, like a light switch or clock. Form a small triangle or hole with your hands at arm’s length, centering the object in that opening. Now close your left eye. If the object stays centered, your right eye is dominant. If it jumps out of view, your left eye is dominant. Repeat by closing the right eye to confirm.
About one-third of people have some degree of cross-dominance, meaning their dominant eye is on the opposite side from their dominant hand. This is extremely common and not a deficiency. Your brain actually processes dominance differently for motor tasks (like pointing) and sensory tasks (like perceiving depth and contrast), and the dominant eye for each type isn’t always the same. That complexity is part of why cross-dominance is so widespread.
Handgun Techniques for Cross-Dominant Shooters
Handguns are the easiest firearm to adapt because you have two hands on the gun and flexibility in where you position it relative to your face. There are two primary approaches.
Shifting the Firearm
This is the simplest fix. Using an isosceles stance (feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, arms fully extended), the handgun naturally sits between both eyes. From there, you shift the gun a few inches toward your dominant eye rather than centering it in front of your dominant hand. Your body stays squared to the target with your nose, toes, and thumbs all pointed downrange. Only the gun moves. This works well because the adjustment is small and doesn’t change your posture or limit your field of vision.
Turning or Tilting the Head
The alternative is keeping the gun where it is and bringing your dominant eye to the sights. You can rotate your head on its vertical axis, like turning to look over your shoulder slightly, but this pushes one eye off to the side and cuts into your peripheral vision. A better version is tilting your head slightly toward your dominant hand’s bicep, which brings the dominant eye behind the sights while keeping your face pointed mostly forward. This head tilt happens naturally in the Weaver stance, where your dominant foot drops slightly behind the other. For a right-handed, left-eye-dominant shooter, a small rightward tilt lines the left eye up with the sights.
Rifles and Shotguns Are Harder to Adapt
Long guns present a bigger challenge than handguns. A rifle or shotgun is shouldered on one side, which locks the corresponding eye into the sighting position. If you’re right-handed but left-eye dominant, shouldering the gun on your right puts your weaker eye directly behind the sights with no easy way to shift the firearm across your face.
You have three realistic options. The first is learning to shoot from the opposite shoulder, mounting the rifle on your dominant-eye side. This feels awkward initially, especially with the trigger hand, but many shooters adapt within a few range sessions. It’s the only option that fully solves the alignment problem. The second is using occlusion: placing a small piece of translucent tape on your shooting glasses over the dominant eye. This doesn’t black out the eye entirely. Instead, it blurs the sight picture just enough that your brain shifts to the other eye for aiming, while still allowing peripheral vision and depth perception. Competitive shooters often use a tiny piece of clear scotch tape positioned on the upper portion of the lens, sized to blur only the sight picture without blocking general awareness. The third option is simply closing your dominant eye while aiming, though this eliminates depth perception and can cause facial tension that affects your hold.
The military study’s qualification gap (86% vs. 57%) involved rifle shooting specifically, which underscores how much more cross-dominance affects long guns than handguns. Researchers concluded that identifying cross-dominant shooters early and giving them targeted training could substantially improve their performance.
Archery Has Its Own Solutions
Archery amplifies the cross-dominance problem because you draw the string to an anchor point on your face, and your bow hand determines which eye should be doing the aiming. A right-handed bow positions the arrow on the left side of the riser, designed for right-eye aiming. If your left eye is dominant, it will try to take over the sight picture and throw off your point of aim.
Three methods work in archery. The simplest is closing your non-aiming eye entirely through the shot sequence: establish your anchor point with both eyes open, then close the dominant eye that’s fighting for control, verify the sight picture, and release. The second is wearing an eye patch over the dominant eye, which reduces the facial tension of holding an eye shut through a long aiming sequence. The third, favored by many competitive archers, is a blinder: a small piece of opaque material (roughly 1 by 2 inches) clipped to a hat brim. At full draw, it blocks only the dominant eye’s view of the sight while preserving peripheral vision and light. This lets you keep both eyes physically open, which feels more natural and maintains better overall awareness.
Whichever method you choose, check that your peep sight is positioned for the correct eye, your bow’s centershot alignment is accurate, and your anchor point puts the string in a consistent relationship to the aiming eye.
Should You Retrain Your Dominance?
Some instructors advocate training yourself to shoot with the hand that matches your dominant eye rather than compensating with head tilts or gun shifts. The NRA’s teaching position is that shooters will “never be able to perform at their maximum potential until they shoot with the hand under their dominant eye.” This is a strong claim, and it holds up best for long guns, where mechanical constraints make cross-dominance genuinely difficult to work around.
For handguns, the picture is more nuanced. Shifting the gun a few inches is a minor adjustment that many competitive shooters use successfully without switching hands. The cost of retraining your dominant hand’s fine motor skills on the trigger may outweigh the benefit, especially if you’ve already built years of muscle memory. If you’re new to shooting and discovered cross-dominance early, learning to shoot with your dominant-eye-side hand is worth serious consideration. If you’re experienced, the compensating techniques described above are likely more practical.
Practice Drills That Help
Dry fire practice (with an unloaded, verified-safe firearm) is the fastest way to build comfort with any cross-dominance technique. Start by choosing your compensation method, whether that’s shifting the gun, tilting your head, or using tape. Then practice acquiring the sight picture from a ready position repeatedly, focusing on consistency. You’re training your brain to automatically find the correct alignment rather than thinking through it each time.
One useful drill for handgun shooters is the blink check: with both eyes open, aim at a target, then quickly blink your non-dominant eye. If the front sight stays steady, your dominant eye is properly behind the sights. If the sight jumps, your alignment is off and you need to adjust your gun position or head angle. Run this check periodically during dry fire until the correct alignment becomes automatic. Over a few weeks of regular practice, most cross-dominant shooters find that the compensation becomes unconscious, and the accuracy gap narrows considerably.