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rsa-otc
12-24-2011, 04:35 AM
Need a little guidance here. My daughter is graduating college this spring and is pursuing a military career with the Marines. While an excellent pistol shot she is strongly cross eye dominate and struggles with shoulder mounted weapons. Living in the peoples republic of NJ, other than shooting shotguns in my youth I have little experience teaching people how to shoot long guns. I'm thinking about picking up an M&P 15-22 and working with her on this problem to give her a step up before entering basic training. What guidance and drills can you give me? Littlelebowski maybe you can give me some insight on how the Corp handles this in basic training. If she wasn't pursuing a military career I probably just have her shoot lefty or mount an RDS on the rifle.

Little background on Brianna. She's a third degree black belt and an excellent pistol shot. She was 7/8's of the way thru the process to get into the Navel Academy but injured her hip teaching Karate right before the physical fitness test and couldn't pass the running portion. Her goal has been a military career and hasn't wavered in that pursuit. A highly intelligent and motivated person with the right guidance I don't think this will be a problem for her.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Joseph B.
12-24-2011, 05:36 AM
In the Army we will deal with it one of two ways, either she learns how to shoot with her non-dominate eye or she learns to shoot on her weak side. I am pretty sure the USMC handles it the same way, mainly b/c that really is about all you can do with it.

Unless she has a vision limitation in her non-dominate eye, it really should not be a problem. I have trained many soldiers to shoot with their non-dominate eye and in some case taught them to shoot irons with both eyes open with cross eye dominate issues. The best advice I can give, is to let the USMC teach her how they want her to learn. If you teach her to do it one way, and they teach her to do it another it will confuse her and could lead to problems “hey recruit why are you doing it that way, that not how we taught you”.

The USMC is well known for their Basic Rifle Marksmanship program, it is by far one of the best in the world. I would say her showing up with a clean slate (no prior M16/M4 training) and being taught by some of the best BRM instructors in the world will be all she needs. Later on, getting her some advanced level training (VTAC, RB1, LAV, etc) would be a cool birthday/Christmas gift.

Just my $0.02

SLG
12-24-2011, 08:52 AM
I have basically the same problem. I learned to shoot lefty to compensate. When I realized that I still preferred to shoot righty, I simply closed my left eye. That was with irons. When I went to RDS, I forced myself to keep my left eye open at the same time. About 6 months and 20,000 rounds later, no issue at all. YMMV, or course.

secondstoryguy
12-24-2011, 09:59 AM
I have left eye dominance. I began shooting around the house(4 or 5) with pellet guns, .22s, pistols and basically grew up in the woods plinking and hunting using my left eye/left shoulder/hand. When I was about 7 or 8 my father got me involved with competitive smallbore shooting. The only left handed rifles they had were turn of the century POSs so I taught myself to shoot right handed in order to fire the nice new Anschutz rifles they had. After a short time my body/eyes adjusted in and now I can shoot either way with ease. I believe it made me into a much better overall shooter as I have no real weak side. In the military shooting you really need to learn to shoot of the right shoulder as she will be at a slight disadvantage off the left. I would probably buy her a metric assload of .22 and have her plink for a while at nothing in particular till she got the feel for it. Shooting skeet also helped me get rid of my left dominance.

rsa-otc
12-24-2011, 01:05 PM
My original intention was similar to Joe Bell's advice. Let the military handle it. Unfortunately the IDPA crowd we hang with is starting to run multi-gun and she is Jonesing to get her grubby mitts on a M4 or equivalents.

Thanks for the replies

BWT
12-24-2011, 08:03 PM
It irritated me, I thought I could keep both eyes open and remember to close my left in time to aim, etc, but whenever I did any kind of action shooting, I would forget, it caused me to be slower, if I forgot I'd miss.

I broke down. I started shooting rifles left handed, and I shoot handguns right handed.

That being said... It really after the learning curve has it's benefits, I can shoot both pistols and rifles comfortably with both hands, and shooting handguns right handed and rifles left handed, I feel well practiced.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZDbBruI3SM&list=UUDclz6TuklXnRuXvOypkLAg&index=16&feature=plcp

It comes in handy. (Disclaimer, it's not my youtube channel, it's my brother's, if you want to start exploring...Yeah)