my wife says looking through the sights of her M4 and g26, and trying to focus on the front sight, makes her “cross-eyed.” i’ve tried to get her to explain this better, but all she can tell me is that when she looks through the rear sight, on either weapon, and tries to focus on the front sight, her eyes get blurry/cross-eyed. when i tilt the rear of the weapon away, leaving only the front sight in her line of sight, she says focusing on the front sight is no problem, it’s only when looking at the fron sight through the rear sight.
her M4 has standard carry-handle peep rear sight, and her glock 26 had standard glock sights on it.
she wears glasses all the time… i dont know how bad her vision is, but it’s bad enough that she doesn’t like to drive or really do much of anything without her glasses on. she’s also been saying, lately, that she thinks it’s time to get her perscription updated because of frequent headaches that seem to her to be from her glasses.
its keeping her from training with enthusiasm. kids keep her from coming to the range with any degree of regularity, and she’s still what i’d call “brand new” to handgun shooting. she’s only about one step up on carbine/rifle shooting. i’ve been trying to get her dry-firing at night… working on stance, grip, trigger squeeze, etc- all in preparation for when we can start getting some serious rounds down range… but she constantly complains about not being able to focus on the front sight during these drills.
any of you trainers out there experience people having trouble focusing on the front sight, and WTF do you do to correct it? i know nothing about eyes and eye conditions- does she have some kind of eye problem? is this just a training issue? i tested her for eye dominance, and she appears to be right-handed and right-eyed. i’m clueless.
She’s probably cross dominant, left eyed and right handed. Cover her shooting glasses on the left with cloudy Scotch tape or a business card and see if it stops. If it does then she’s likely left eye dominant. If she’s extremely left eye dominant she may do best shooting long guns left handed and handguns right handed as Larry Vickers does.
I’m cross dominant and can actually shoot more accurately left handed with both handguns and long guns. But I’m must faster right handed. It’s easy for me shooting a handgun right handed using my left eye. And shooting non-magnified optics right handed is pretty easy too shooting both eyes open. For highly magnified optics I prefer to shoot left handed.
I am dealing w/ something similar to this now. I have been working with a very hesitant, female relative for about a while now. This has been almost entirely dry. She is near-sighted and not cross dominant. My instructions have been simple. I explained sight picture and advised to focus on the front sight. First off, as is common with inexperienced shooters she tells me that keeping both eyes open causes double vision. With or without glasses, with one or two eyes open though, she says she cannot find the front sight while “looking through the rear sight”. I frankly do not understand and cannot get a better explanation. Last session, after a while, my patience expended, I finally told her that I was unable to provide any additional assistance. I told her to take the handgun in the other room and figure it out. Not sure where to go from here. I have absolutely no idea what to do. Next time I will ask her to describe again to me why she cannot obtain a sight picture. Maybe something will click.
Also – and this is just guessing without seeing her – if she’s holding the pistol too close to her face it will exacerbate the problems from cross-dominance or weak dominance.
I have seen ‘new’ shooters pay way too much attention trying to focus 3 different objects at the same time which will make your brain hurt…they appear to start their focus on the aligning of the rear sight to the front, then to the target.
It seems to help if I have them forget about the immediate sight alignment and focus only on the target…Bring the front sight into the image and see where they print.
Hopefully it is something as simple as just paying too much attention to the rear sight focus.
I’ve had this work extraordinarily well in teaching some die-hard, stubborn fools to shoot both eyes open with optics, as well as to diagnose those who actually have no dominant eye. It can help answer a lot of eye/aiming device relationship questions without completely blanking out the whole eye.
im thinking astigmatism now… and when i mentioned it to her, she said “oh, i think my doctor might have said something about that last time i was in.” bless her heart.
i rechecked her for eye-dominance, using a few different techniques, and she strongly favors her right eye every time… i even tried to get her to zero in with her left, and she’d auto-pilot back to her right every time.
Maybe my eyes are messed up too, but I think going “blurry”, “cross-eyed” and 'double vision" is part of focusing on the front sight. Especially with pistols, I see 2 fuzzy images of the rear sight, and 2 fuzzy images of the target when I’m focusing on the front sight. Training your brain to ignore the wrong images and line up the correct images is part of learning sight alignment. For me (right-handed, right-eyed), I ignore the right image of the rear sight and the left image of the target. All the multiple blurry objects may be giving her trouble focusing on the front sight as her brain struggles to prioritize which of 5 images (2 targets, 1 front sight, 2 rear sights) to focus on. The big white bracket on the plastic Glock rear sight probably doesn’t help with the clutter. Sharpie that thing in until you get some real sights.
As others have mentioned, a temporary solution may be for her to shoot with her left eye closed until she gets a better grasp of sight alignment, and then have her start shooting with both eyes open. Be warned that it may be tough to wean her off the crutch of shooting with one eye closed. It took me years to get as comfortable drawing my focus to the front sight with both eyes open. I still close my left eye for shots outside 25yds.
I have one eye that’s near-sighted and one that’s far sighted. I cannot shoot with both eyes open…it just doesn’t work because it takes me several seconds to focus on small objects…much more time than it takes to compensate by shooting with one eye.
can anyone help please,