Strange question here which may or may not have an answer.
I have lousy depth perception, because my stereoscopic ability is pretty minimal*. I can’t see ‘Magic Eye’ type pictures or 3d movies, and I’m completely worthless at sports like tennis or softball, which require you to track how fast a small object is approaching you.
If, hypothetically, I were to try to learn how to shoot a handgun, would this have an adverse effect on my ability to, you know, hit what I was aiming for?
*After I had surgery to correct strabismus when I was 7, my ophthalmologist informed my pediatrician in a letter I found that my “stereoscopic ability has improved from gross only to 400 arc seconds following the operation,” which I assume means ‘it’s improved but still sucks’.
I’m in the exact same boat, actually. Strabismus surgery when I was about the same age - and now my occular alignment is perfect, but I think by this time my brain hadn’t learned to combine the image from both eyes to form a stereoscopic picture.
I don’t know to what degree, if any, I can perceive stereoscopically - my opthamologists have never given me a good answer, and I don’t know if there’s some sort of test for it. I know that at any given time, I can perceive which eye I’m looking out of, and that I’m still getting visual data out of the other one - and I can switch without doing anything physically - it’s just that my brain picks one eye or the other to be the primary one.
I can’t tell to what degree I perceive depth any more than a color blind person can really know how much of one color or the other they’re perceiving. If you don’t know what you’re missing, how would you know?
I’m an above average handgun shooter (in fact when I took my CCW test my instructor took time to point out my shooting to the rest of the class) and I don’t think it has hampered my ability. I don’t think you need stereoscopic vision to aim - you’re looking at lining up the front and rear sights on one plane, which means you want to only be using one eye anyway, I think. You could close one eye and still aim effectively. It may be a bad habit simply because you’re closing off the peripheral vision of your other eye, but it shouldn’t affect the quality of your aiming.
On the other hand, it sounds as if you may have a bigger problem than me - I’m not great at the hand eye coordination thing, but I can do an adequate job at tracking and catching moving objects. I think I’ve just grown more adept at picking up other visual cues unrelated to stereoscopic vision… maybe if there was a baseball league where you had to wear a randomly alternating patch over one eye, I could be a star
I’ve had a similar problem. I have only 20-400 vision in my right eye which can be corrected to only 20-200. (I can’t even tell the difference when it’s corrected.)
When I made an attempt to play darts with friends, all of my darts landed to the right of the dart board. You would think that after Round One that I would learn to correct for the amount of error, but I was sure something was wrong with the technique used in throwing the dart.
I could never hit a tennis ball or a softball and never thought to tell the coach about my vision. No one told me that it could make a difference and since I had seen this way from birth, to me what I saw was normal. So was messing up at everything.
Of course, all my friends wondered why I drove by ear.
I suppose that you could learn to correct for error in learning to shoot, but that seems so iffy. There are, however, blind people who golf. They have volunteers to help set their shots up for them.
If you want to learn to shoot, take all proper precautions and learn in a setting where you won’t be hurting anyone. Find a patient teacher. I’ll bet you could learn to do it.
I’m a little near sighted in one eye, far sighted in the other. It messes up depth perception so bad that if something is in the air so I can’t use the ground as a ruler, such as an incoming ball, then god help me if I need to catch it.
I’ve only shot a gun maybe 3 times in my life. Two of them are at a tin can. Second one hit it! I do great at shooting games though, and archery. The ground can make a great ruler for the archery target.
Unless you’re doing some really long range shots, you should do fine. How important is compensating for how much the bullet will fall before it hits the target? That’s all you need depth preception for.
Stereoscopic vision doesn’t really come into play. If you’re using iron sights you have to get the target, the front sight, rear sight, and your eye all in a straight line. You can’t do that with both eyes at once. What happens is that you end up with a double image, but you have to ignore it and just pay attention to what you’re seeing out of your dominant eye. It’s possible you could actually be better at this, if you’re used to having your eyes misaligned. Otherwise, you can close one eye, but that tends be uncomfortable after a while. You can also wear something to block the other eye.
I wouldn’t think binocular vision is required for shooting a gun. You don’t use both eyes to use the sights, just one eye. The Wikipedia article has a lot of ways to test your eye dominance. I’m lefthanded but tend to be right eye dominant, but I can use either eye for sights when shooting. I always close the one eye I’m not using so the vision coming from that eye doesn’t distract me.
Now, for skeet shooting you would suck ass at it, as you have to hit moving targets. But taking the guns down to the range and putting holes in paper I think you’ll be just fine.
FYI, if you’re closing one eye and looking through the sight, then stereopsis is irrelevant. As a depth cue it’s strongest at intermediate distances – 1-3 meters, if I recall correctly from visual perception coursework. Farther off, other depth cues, which are monocular (such as motion parallax, occlusion, and placement along the vertical axis) are more informative.
Anecdotally, I have a monocular friend (light perception only in his “bad” eye) who plays pool and is pretty good at it. He’s in an amateur league and is ranked, if I recall correctly, 5 out of 6, 6 being the highest. Pool players often shut one eye to reduce parallax, or the conflicting information from different eyes. Monocularity can actually be a benefit here.
In target shooting, it doesn’t matter at all - you’re only using one eye, preferably the dominant one. You want to keep both eyes open though, just because closing your off eye is one more thing to worry about, and difficult to do without the eyelids of the open eye narrowing as well. Instead, you’ll see a lot of target shooters use glasses with a frosted lens over their non-shooting eye, or they just cover it with some scotch tape. That way you can keep both eyes open, but there won’t be an image from the off eye to confuse your sight picture.
I don’t do any of the combat shooting courses, but I’d imagine it’s a much bigger deal there, since you have to pick up moving/popup targets and the like on the fly.
I have almost no depth perception - my eyes had such different levels of myopia as a child that I guess my brain just learned how to compensate, but I can’t see Magic Eye pictures or any of that, and I flunk a lot of optical illusions. I shoot just fine, no worse than anybody else who gets the (lack of) practice I do. I do pretty well at trap shooting with my dad, actually.
I have a friend who is blind in one eye. I’ve taken him shooting a couple of times, and he did as well or better than any other newb.
Note that this was pistol and rifle shooting. Wingshooting with shotguns is a different deal. It wouldn’t suprise me if lack of depth perception were more of a handicap in that situation.
Another thing: Eye dominance normally follows hand dominance, but there are LOTS of people with “cross dominance” They either have to shoot long guns wrong handed or wrong eyed. If you need to do that, shoot right handed, as this will allow a far greater selection of guns.
If you’ve never had the depth perception to begin with, IMHO it doesn’t make much of a difference - if you can drive, you can hit a few clay pigeons. Your brain has figured out workarounds based on experience.
It makes a huge difference. I was never a great shot but after I developed keratoconus, I had two more strikes against me: 1) no depth perception and 2) my right eye is dominant but has worse vision. (In fact, even after cornea transplants, my right eye remains around 20/100 with no good way to correct it).
So… I can shoot from the hip about as well as I can shoot when I’m aiming. Most of the time, I can hit a paper target (never tried clay pigeons) from closer ranges, but the idea of aiming for a specific part of the target is laughable. It’s a little like learning to draw with your left hand.
I have lousy vision (20/280) and 20/450) and lousy depth perception.
But riflery only used one eye anyway, to sight with.
I took riflery as my gym class when I was a senior in high school and got my marksman’s medal.
I close one eye when I’m shooting a rifle. With handguns…let me see…when I’m target shooting, I close one eye as well, but I do often shoot with both eyes open.
