When shooters begin to learn to see the target behind where the barrel is pointed, they stop looking at the barrel. The barrel has a place in the picture, but it is always in the periphery.

We have been using a gun mount practice to show the brain what it really looks like to see the target behind where the muzzle is pointed, we call it the three-bullet drill. If you put in the time and work, this simple gun mount drill will make any visual issues fade away, especially in women.

Any beginner will shorten the road to proficiency by simply getting the unloaded gun out of the closet or gun room and doing the drill to begin to show your brain how you want the electromagnetic sequences it gets from our senses to be interpreted. The sooner you eliminate any visual confusion when the target and muzzle come together, the sooner you will increase your proficiency at the range or in the field. The more you practice the sight pictures, the more the brain understands how you want them to look and files these images away in your long-term memory to be used when in the field or on the range.

All your skill is filed away in your long-term memory, ready to be used at a moment’s notice. If you have no memory of what something looks like, the brain cannot interpret the retinal data sequences it receives when you are focused on a moving target. It doesn’t matter whether you are mowing your yard or taking your shotgun apart to clean it… the brain can’t do anything unless it first has a picture. This makes it a necessity to be clear to the brain what it looks like with the target to the left or right of the barrel!

Why to the left or right of the barrel? Because that is where the target must be if the barrel is ahead of the target. What that looks like to you is really important to having success in the field or at the range. Remember, the muzzle must be ahead of the target. That means when looking at the target, you will be either looking at the target to the left or right of the barrel.

The reason women have more of a problem than men with this visually is that the female brain is a nurturing brain that is naturally comfortable with things that are 35 inches in front their nose. Men, on the other hand, have a hunting brain and live at infinity. They’re accustomed to looking at things at distance over under or around something. So, looking at a distant object and aligning something with it comes more naturally for men, but for women the instant they mount the gun they instinctively focus on the end of the gun because they live their lives 35 inches in front of their nose.

After helping thousands of women and men to understand the sight picture when shooting moving targets with a shotgun, we have concluded that this simple well-known fact in the differences in men and women’s brains leads to more confusion in women’s brains than in men’s. After watching in excess of eight million targets each fired in anger at clays and game birds on three continents, it does come down to “men are from Mars and women are from Venus.”