Saturday, October 24, 2015

Left Side, or Right?

I'm in a quandary, and I'm not sure which way I should go.  It's a fairly simple question for most folks, they don't even have to consider it, but I do. I talked about this in July, and got some good advise.  But I'm still considering.

When I was a stripling, pestering my Dad to go hunting, he did a simple test, to ascertain my eye dominance.  I'm right-eye dominant.  I have been all my life.  So, he taught me to shoot a shotgun from my right side.  Eye dominance is very important in shotgun shooting.

I'm normally left-handed.  I swing a hammer with my left hand, I swing a baseball bat from my left side, I pitch left-handed. If you ask me, I'll tell you I'm left-handed.  But when I learned to shot a rifle in the Army, I went right-handed, because it was easier to do so.  Likewise the handgun, I've always carried my duty gun on my right side.

That confounded my Defensive Training instructors, because we normally carry our firearm on the strong-side and our less-lethal on our weak side.  But, if I come out with my baton, you're getting the full gorilla, the go-for-the-fence swing.  One of my DT instructors told me, after a particularly brutal left-side arm-bar takedown, "You don't have a weak side."

But, I continue to wear my duty gun on the right side.  I'm used to it, and the draw is unconscious.  It works well for me from long years of practice, right-eye dominance, and hundreds of thousands of draws.  I'm not swapping my LEO draw.

But, I come to this fast draw game, and when I talked about this in July, some advised me to wait until after the next match.  I did that, drawing from my right side for the main match.  But, during a fun match where we carried and shot two guns, one of my hand-judges told me that I was faster from my left side.  The quandary returned.

In Cowboy Fast Draw, we don't use the sights.  It's all draw and fire.  So, for the past month or so, I've been concentrating on my left side.  Accuracy is just as good as from the right side, and speed is a tiny bit quicker.  This is a game of milliseconds, and a tiny bit quicker is measurable.

I've got some good left-side holsters, and I believe I'll start practicing from the left side, and go southpaw at the next match.  We'll see what happens.  This might be a permanent move.

1 comment:

Ryan said...

1- Does shooting strong side help your overall situation? Hip fire has a (very narrow) role and it might help you.

2- Does shoting off hand hurt you?

FWIW I would rock point shooting with strong hand.