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Sally Bartoo is an enthusiastic bull’s-eye shooter and firearms instructor, who happens to be cross-dominant. That is, she is right handed but her master eye is her left one. She learned to shoot left-handed and has won many awards at Camp Perry on down. After she trained with me, she shoots dominant hand for CCW and IDPA.

She still has a strong interest in the topic, though, and recently forwarded some interesting material. A study of 5,546 subjects from 40 years ago determined almost a third were “cross-dom.” 28.6 percent had left eye and right hand preference, while 3.9 percent had right eye and left hand preference. The citation was “Rengstorff, 1967.” The same study found 91.5 percent of those surveyed were right-handed, 7.7 percent southpaws, and 1.1 percent ambidextrous.

Having been teaching the handgun for some 35 years, I’d have to say those figures from four decades ago sound about right. No mention was made in the posting of gender or racial breakdown, but I’ve noticed more African-Americans than Caucasians are cross-dominant, far more females than males are cross-dominant and half or somewhat more than half of black females I’ve encountered are too.

Switching to the non-dominant hand is an old tradition. You see it more among lefties, because they’re used to living in a right-handed world and because so many of the guns and holsters are readily available in “righty format only.” The fact is, though, technique can be easily altered to correct this problem.

One-Hand Shooting

The turning of the head on the axis of the neck to bring left eye in line with extended right hand, or vice versa, is awkward. The first to recognize this and correct it was Bill McMillan, shooting for the US Marine Corps team in the late 1950s. McMillan figured out if he simply canted the pistol somewhere from 15 to 45 degrees inboard, adjusting the sights to compensate where necessary, the iron sights of the pistol in his right hand aligned perfectly with his left eye. In 1960 he went Gold for his country and his team in international competition, and the technique was proven.

One of his contemporaries, on the practical pistol side, was Ray Chapman, who would become the first world champion of the combat handgun. Ray wasn’t cross-dominant, but he found a 15 to 45 degree cant of the pistol put the skeleto-muscular support structure of the human arm into a more propitious alignment and strengthened the hand. He recommended it even for same eye/hand dominant shooters, and it is taught today as technique of choice for one-handed self-defense shooting at the Chapman Academy Ray founded and at Thunder Ranch.

It is less popular today with cross-dominant bull’s-eye shooters, because the game has gone to red dot sights for the most part, which are higher over the bore axis than iron sights and require significantly more adjustment to compensate for the changed angle between line of sight and line of bore.

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• Two-Hand Shooting
• Easier For Handgunners

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