What Is Cross Dominance in Shooting?
Cross-dominance occurs when your dominant eye is on the opposite side of your dominant hand. If you're right-handed but left-eye dominant (or vice versa), you're cross-dominant.
How Cross-Dominance Affects Your Shooting
When you look at a target with both eyes open, the dominant eye picks up the target first. If that eye is on the opposite side of your gun mount, the brain establishes the wrong barrel-to-target relationship — you think you're aligned, but the barrel is actually pointing somewhere else. This leads to:
- Missing targets you feel you should have hit, often without understanding why
- Eye shifting or cross-firing — when the non-dominant eye suddenly takes control of the aiming process mid-shot
- Eye fatigue and headaches from fighting your natural eye dominance
Cross-firing or eye shifting is the phenomenon that happens when the non-dominant eye takes control of the aiming process while shooting at a moving target. This can be caused by tired eyes, poor eyesight, or weak or neutral eye dominance. The symptoms of cross-firing can be found in many "aiming" errors and cases of flinching.
How Common Is Cross-Dominance?
Many shooters go years without knowing they're cross-dominant — they just know something feels "off" when they shoot, or they struggle with consistency despite good form.
Test for Cross Dominance
This is a simple test you can do in seconds to discover which of your eyes is dominant:
- Hold your arms out straight and raised to eye level. Keep your palms out and your fingers together with only your thumbs extending out.
- Tilt your palms inward placing them one over the other to form a small triangular opening.
- Looking through the triangle, focus on a distant fixed point and pull your arms back toward your face.
You will notice that you have pulled your hands back toward one eye or the other. That is your dominant eye, and if it is on the opposite side of your dominant hand, you are cross-dominant.
For a more detailed walkthrough, see our eye dominance test page.
What Can You Do About It?
There are several approaches shooters use to deal with cross-dominance. Classic solutions include closing one eye, using tape or dots on shooting glasses, wearing an eye patch, or switching to the opposite shoulder. However, all of these reduce binocular vision — your ability to perceive depth, speed, and angle using both eyes.
XD Solution takes a different approach. It's a device that mounts on the trigger guard and uses a semi-transparent blade to block only the barrel view from the cross-dominant eye. This preserves full binocular vision during the shooting action — you can see the target with both eyes open while preventing the dominant eye from seeing the barrel.
For a detailed comparison of all approaches, see our guide on how to fix cross dominance without losing depth perception.