Shooting Low and Left: Causes and Fixes

Shooting low and to the weak side is one of the most common problems Rob Pincus sees on the range. With right handers, who are the majority of the population, it’s shooting low and to the left. This happens because most people have poor support on the weak side of their gun, or they’re not really isolating their trigger press. In this video, Rob isolates what the causes are and advises how to fix them.

FOR LEFT-HANDERS

If you’re left handed, reverse mirror image Rob’s advice and think about if you shoot low and to the right. You’ve got all the same issues as a right-handed person shooting low and to the left.

RAPID UNSIGHTED FIRE

When Rob teaches handgun training courses and sees a pattern of shots going low and to the weak side during rapid-fire strings using kinesthetic alignment, the first thing he looks at is the shooter’s weak arm. The strong-side arm is usually fully extended, but if the shooter has a partially extended weak-side arm, perhaps because they first learned to shoot using a bladed position, that weak arm creates drag on the gun when shooting a rapid string of fire, and that pulls the gun down.

The solution for this is to make sure the body is squared off to the target and both arms are fully extended and engaged. This is true for both hands — if the support hand is low on the gun, it can also create an unsupported platform.

The shooter has not only the physical drag he might get from having a bent elbow, but he also may have a straight arm but doesn’t have the shoulder fully engaged. Ensuring there is extra extension and extra engagement of the weak-side shoulder is one way to take a rapid-fire group that’s sinking low left and push it back up.

HIGHER-PRECISION SIGHTED FIRE

When shooting at smaller targets and using sighted fire, the most common problem Rob sees is related to trigger control: a sympathetic compression of the strong-side fingertips of the hand when the trigger is pressed. This twists the gun as the shot breaks. Rob explains this in detail and gives his advice for correcting it.