Why You Must Practice Off-Hand Shooting For Survival
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It’s easy to say that the fundamentals of marksmanship remain the same regardless of the hand you use, but it is difficult to put into practice. Trigger squeeze, however, often poses a problem since your dominant hand trigger finger may have learned to gently but firmly squeeze the trigger over the course of thousands of trigger pulls, whereas your non-dominant or off-hand has no such experience.
If you have never practiced off-hand shooting, consider picking up that handgun with the flip side. Or putting the butt of that rifle on the opposite shoulder. In doing so, you will pick up a new skill and add a measure of versatility to your shooting.
You are holding the gun on another facet of your body than you normally would. A pistol held at the off hand is still in the middle of the body more or less. While a rifle is fully on the opposite side of your body than it normally would be. It is like viewing your back yard from a neighbor’s house — the details are the same, but the view differs. Off-hand rifle shooting is a particularly useful skill for shooting around barricades that confront the”wrong” angle and thus prevent you from using your dominant hand.
Off-Hand Shooting Fundamentals
Off-Hand Shooting
Sometimes referred to as weak-hand shooting (as opposed to strong-hand shooting), off-hand shooting is simply shooting with your non-dominant hand; if you are right-handed, this means shooting with the left hand, and vice versa. To some people, switching hands results in the feeling of the gun being completely new and foreign to them; the feel is different. The angle above the sights might even be different depending on how you normally hold the rifle in your dominant hand. Everything about off-hand shooting differs when you attempt it for the first time. Everything of course, except the fundamentals of marksmanship, which remain the same regardless of the hand or the weapon you use.
off-hand shooting
The typical range environment will box shooters to a situation that focuses more on safety than it does on developing the skills you need to survive a gun battle. The safety angle isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most shooting ranges are designed to accommodate both the professional shooter along with the first time shooter who has never handled a weapon in his or her life. To be able to accomplish this assignment, ranges operate under a series of security rules that prevent things like prone, crouching, or kneeling shooting positions as well as any sort of movement or deviation from the firing line. Drawing in the holster is generally not permitted, unless the shooter happens to be law enforcement. The net result is that range shooters will typically have a remarkably narrow and concentrated shooting ability that is much less tactical than their military or law enforcement counterparts.
- Since you have two hands. They should know how to do the very same things as every other, especially with respect to firearms.
- Because in a firefight there isn’t any guarantee that you will be permitted to use your dominant hand. With which hand you will reach for that gun circumstances will dictate.
- Your dominant hand may become injured or unusable prior to or during a firefight.
- You may be forced to shoot from behind a barricade or obstacle that favors your weak hand. By way of instance, if you’re right-handed and lean up against a corner, and need to take towards the right side, around the corner. To expose to the target the least, you will have to take with your left hand.
Off-hand shooting is a skill that should be mastered. Try it in the range simply by switching hands — it’s that simple! For handguns, most people will do just as good — or sometimes better — than they do with their dominant hand. They more careful than they would be with their dominant hand, and are just as accurate. The downside is speed; few people unpracticed in off-hand shooting can crack off as many rounds as accurately as they could while shooting their dominant hand but thankfully that changes with practice.
As you may not have access to a shooting area which permits some of the above described alternate shooting positions, there is a segment of your shooting that you are probably not as well practiced at. The one that you can practice in any indoor range — off-hand shooting.