Many gun owners prefer shooting with both hands, but there are benefits to learning one-handed shooting, too. Keep reading to learn why.
Learning One-Handed Shooting
When firing a handgun, you’ll ideally always (and only) shoot with both hands on the weapon and with specific stances, with good grip/trigger discipline.
One-handed shooting isn’t worth your time even though it looks cool in movies… right? Wrong.
In fact, one-handed shooting could be a crucial skill you should learn for self-defense. Let’s get into the details.
Perfect Form Doesn’t Always Matter
You probably know from your earliest handgun training days that good form – meaning stance, gun grip, trigger discipline, etc. – matters a lot.
Your instructor, whether he or she was a friend or someone you paid for professional help, likely drilled your form and stance into your brain a ton before letting you take a single shot.
This is great in theory. But in reality, and in moments of heightened fear and adrenaline, people rarely fall back to their perfect forms like they were taught.
It’s just human nature. No amount of practice can actually prepare you for having to use your handgun in self-defense.
In an alleyway, when someone draws a knife, chances are you won’t be thinking about how you should keep your legs spread apart and lean into your weapon to offset the recoil.
You’ll just be worried about drawing it quickly enough to bring the barrel around to your target.
Furthermore, the majority of self-defense handgun situations occur within arm’s reach.
In other words, there won’t be a lot of space between you and your attacker if you ever are in a legitimate self-defense scenario.
You may need to draw your weapon in a confined space, particularly if they’re already lunging at you or trying to grab you.
The overall point to all of this hypothetical discussion is that in a real-world situation, you may not be able to use both hands to fire with perfect stability and accuracy.
You may need to shoot with one hand.
Is One-Handed Shooting Ideal?
Not really, and never in a self-defense situation.
No matter how good you get, chances are that you’ll almost always be more accurate if you fire with both hands than if you fire with one hand.
But this isn’t always something you can think about, particularly in a fast-paced self-defense scenario.
In such a situation, your primary objective should be to take down your attacker and protect yourself and/or your loved ones.
Worrying about perfect accuracy or shooting to wound in the leg is both not something you ought to be thinking about or something you will be thinking about.
Therefore, the goal of practicing one-handed shooting is to get good enough that you don’t totally miss your target and hurt someone else, and so you can obtain the muscle memory to draw quickly in a close-quarters environment.
Muscle Memory Can Save You
Training to become better at one-handed shooting serves the same benefit as training at all: it drills muscle memory into your body.
If someone attacks you and you need to defend yourself, you can’t always rely on your conscious thoughts to come up with a plan in time to mount an effective defense.
Muscle memory – like if you’ve drilled a one-handed draw into your arm enough – can save you as an instinctual reaction. Furthermore, training to become better at one-handed shooting will let you take a shot more accurately in the split-second moment you have to react before someone reaches you.
Always Be Prepared
All in all, the reality of a self-defense situation is this:
- most personal attacks occur within arm’s reach
- you may need to defend yourself in close quarters, preventing you from using both arms
- one arm may be incapacitated after an initial attack
- you may need to use one arm to fend off an attacker while you draw your concealed pistol
Therefore, practicing your one-handed shooting is not only smart, but it may be necessary to ensure your safety at some point in the future.
Practicing your one-handed shooting will allow you to defend yourself capably even if all of the above factors come into play.
What are your struggles with one-handed shooting? Let us know in the comments section!
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When I started to learn to shoot with a pistol I started with a 44 Magnum and one handed in the whole reason was to build strength in my right hand so whenever I went to a 9 mm or a 380 or something of that caliber it would not be very difficult to shoot with one hand after practicing with a 44 Mag
Is very similar with shooting a rifle learn how to shoot a high power then when you learn how to shoot at lower power it’s so much easier on your body and you get better accuracy I agree though I practice practice practice is the best way to do it and the whole muscle memory thing and learn how to squeeze the trigger and not pull it because you’re concerned about the Kik the only thing I like to do when I’m teaching is to make it stressful for the shooter so when they come into a situation like that they handle it much better very Campbell right before you feel they’re going to squeeze the trigger screen now something to distract them shopping that way whenever it the time that they need to shoot nothing will get in the way of making that accurate shot specially if your deer hunting or a self-defense situation nothing will distract you from making the shot you need to make it is very effective and it works especially if you care about teaching someone how to keep themselves alive in any situation thank you for your time