What do you guys think about aiming with both eyes open - or aiming with your dominant eye? I was clueless about this whole issue and last night tested my eyes. My left eye is clearly dominant over my right and I also do not have astigmatism in my left eye. I do in the right.
Also where do you all recommend trying to hold the target? 6 o'clock hold? Dead center?
Aim with your dominant eye, and keep both eyes open. Closing one eye effects your depth of field plus keeping your other eye open allows your peripheral vision in that eye to see anything approaching (in your case) your right side.
Hold depends on the target. For bullseye targets, I recommend 6 o'clock with the black center resting on top of the front sight. I was taught that in bullseye, it's too hard to judge properly when the front sight is centered as opposed to seeing the black center on top of the sight post, so that's the way I shoot. However for silhouette targets, I recommend aiming for center of the target. To help your eye find that, you can get some cheap stick on round dots used for pricing things, at Staples or Office Max and stick them in the center of the silhouette. You can get them in orange or white.
If you are an older shooter and find it difficult to focus on both sights and the target, there are a couple of tricks you can use. One is to experiment with a piece of cardboard with a real small hole drilled in it. Start small, and keep increasing until you can see both sights and the target focused when looking through the hole. Then either put a piece of tape with the same size hole on your shooting glasses or you can actually buy a contraption that clips on your glasses with a dial of various size holes. A second trick is to focus primarily on the front and rear sight. Your eye will tend to find the center of the target on it's own, even if it's not in focus. I've proven this to folks by turning targets backwards and shooting the center out. The last trick is IMHO the hardest to use, which is getting bifocal glasses and alternating between the two lenses when focusing, but I don't recommend this, as I believe it adds eyestrain and really not needed in the first place if you use one of the first two methods.
Also, although you never asked, I'll throw in some info on holding the firearm. Don't try to strangle it, but hold it firmly. One of the keys to good groups is being able to repeat the same grip each time, as grip affects the effects of recoil, which in turn has an affect on the movement of the gun as the bullet is leaving the barrel. It's impossible to keep the gun from moving when recoiling, so the next best thing is to have move the same each time, and your grip will impact this more than many people realize. To aid in this, practice dry firing, watching the front sight. If the sight remains stationary, your doing it right. If it moves at all, you aren't. Practicing dry firing can get boring, so turn on a good western and practice shooting the bad guys, cows, whatever.
And once again, someone's asked me what time it is and I've told them how to build a clock. I do get verbose from time to time.
