Shooting a shotgun is more about visual information than any one thing. Yet there are reams of material written about what the gun does when you shoot a moving object. You can’t be focused on the target and be even thinking about the gun, because your focus follows your thoughts.
It is a vision game. Yet most of the comments you hear on a clays course are about lead, sight picture and swing mechanics.
We hear this often: “I can focus on the target and see the gun in my periphery.” This perception is held by many shooters, but the unfortunate thing is that the periphery cannot see anything sharply. It can only see movement.
When you combine that fact with the fact that any visual information that you perceive in the periphery arrives at the motor center in the brain as much as 200-300 milliseconds behind real time, is it any wonder that the overwhelming number of targets missed are missed behind? They are not missed behind because the lead was incorrect. They are missed behind because the shooter was looking for the lead, and when they saw the “picture” they pulled the trigger.
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