That staring doohickey was a dirty trick.
Stick your arm out and stick your thumb up in the air without your gun in your hand. focus on your thumbnail with both eyes. Unless you have a problem you should be able to see the striations in your thumb nail, the with of the nail, the quick of your nail and maybe where yu need to take a nail file and clean your nail. Now do it again but arm pointed at the target. close one eye, if the target is still behind the thumb that is your dominant eye, if it moved the other eye is dominant. If you are lucky and most of us are your dominant eye and dominant hand will be the same.
Load up some snap caps and repeat the exercise in front of the target. Raise your barrel till your front sight is up in the air and you can focus on it. Never mind the target just put both of your peepers on the front sight, lower the sight till its centered in the notch and slowly squeeze the trigger. Imagine the front sight as being part of the trigger and when you squeeze the trigger you are pulling the front sight back through the notch of the rear sight. Takes a lot of concentrating on the front sight to do this. You will not know when the gun is going to go off because all of your concentration is controlling the trigger and front sight as one unit.
You may see two targets, no big deal you are shooting at the brighter of the two, that is the one in front of the dominant eye. It will be fuzzy, that is good, it means you are looking at your front sight. If you see both clearly you are bull gazing which means your focus is exactly between the front sight and the target and you aren't really seeing either one correctly. This will be evident when you look at the pattern on your target instead of a group.
Now the hard part my friend. blank sheet of whit paper, fine line pen and black ink. Use a ruler and make a perfect horizontal line and in the middle of it a perfect vertical line. extend your arm straight out and touch a wall, that is where the center of that little cross you just made has to go. Preferably not in the living room unless your wife has a really good sense of humor.
Now place gun in your hand and put the barrel up in shooting position, snap caps only, live ammo ruins the paper and upsets women and children when fired in the house. The horizontal line sits on top of the front sight, the vertical line runs up from the center of the front sight. No recoil to worry about, no noise except a little click when the hammer comes down. Focus on that front sight with both eyes again and draw that sight back through the notch of the rear sight, again and again.
When you can do that perfectly 10 times you have completed your first day of perfect sight alignment and trigger squeeze practice, two items with one exercise, how about that for efficiency. Do this daily till you can rip off 10 perfect shots in a row. Be honest, if you vary your focus or your squeeze that line will look like it has run a mile from your sight. Best practice you can get and the cheapest practice you can get. Yup us old dinosaurs who have been shooting for 50 years do it to, or we should if we don't, we get rusty too.
On the range your exercise should make looking at the front sight automatic. The sky overhead and bright light and the wind just makes it more fun. load up and do your exercise again. Do NOT worry about score at this point in time. You are only doing your front sight focus exercise. Later when you are shooting groups you adjust the sight to make it go where you want it to but score is not the point right now. Group size is and that will happen when you get your focus where it belongs, up front on rifle or pistol.
