GUN ROOM : Why lady Guns will never be quite like the men
From: Country Illustrated Magazine. Issue 76, 2006.
Why lady Guns will never
be quite like the men
By Professor P O Behan
It is all in the mind, says Professor P O Behan, a senior neurologist whose study on the
nature of male and female shooters breaks new ground. How the rules of gun-fitting
are not the same for both: and why a lady may shoot better with one eye closed.
THERE is a distinct difference between
men and women in the way
they use their eyes when shooting.
Such differences are unlikely to be
explained by socialisation or nurture,
but are part of a general phenomenon
whereby certain abilities are performed with
greater skill by one gender than the other.
This observation came about in the following
manner, as told to me by Mr Fred Buller,
formerly managing director of the Buckinghamshire
gunmakers, Frederick Beesley.
Some 40 years ago Jack Kidwill, a man of
independent means and a noted game shot
(he and Percy Stanbury were the best Fred
Buller ever saw perform), was a customer of
Frederick Beesley Gunmakers. Although
little could be taught him about shooting,
the details of gun fitting were discussed with
Kidwill, who at the time was more interested in coaching his petite wife Marjory—who
had taken up clay shooting in her 40s—than
he was in his own performances, and indeed
this paid off handsomely when she became
Britain’s lady clay shooting champion and
later European lady champion.
Kidwill lived for shooting, and eventually
took up a full-time job as a shooting coach
and gun-fitter at the West London Shooting
Grounds at Greenford. In due course his
outstanding ability was recognised, and he
became Purdey’s chief gun-fitter, which he
remained for the rest of his years.
Although he fitted all comers, Kidwill had
a special interest in fitting lady shooters, and
he had become aware of different factors to
be considered for them. His discovery was
that the ‘rules’ of gun fitting, so far as a person’s
ability to shoot with two eyes open is
concerned, did not work for many lady shooters,
although no statistical records were kept.
In other words, it was often the case that a
right-handed woman with a right ‘master eye’
still had to close her left eye rather than shoot
with the advantage of having both eyes open,
as most men in a similar position can do.
The word ‘shooting’ here implies shooting
with a shotgun (with all other kinds the
word is qualified, eg rifle shooting). In
shooting it has long been recognised that
the gun must fit the owner if he is to exploit
his talent fully. A properly fitted gun is one
that allows the owner, caught on the wrong
foot while walking through a field of roots,
just as a pheasant rises, to take the next natural
step as he mounts his gun. This is in
contrast to having to make an accommodation
for an ill-fitting gun—one that lacks the
appropriate amount of cast, for instance—by placing the foot obliquely, thereby jeopardising
balance in order to be on target.
It is obvious that variations in human
physique must be taken into account by the
gun-fitter. The most obvious adaptations
are, first, differences in stock length to accommodate
variations in arm length; secondly,
differences in bend in the stock to
accommodate variations in neck length and
shoulder scope; and thirdly, differences in
the amount of cast (cast-off for right-handers,
cast-on for left-handers) in the stock
to accommodate variations of shoulder
width. Before the gun-fitter can get to grips
with the above, however, he must test the sight of his client, even though experience
has taught him that most shooters are righthanded
with a right ‘master eye’.
This ‘master eye’ concept is best understood
if one takes a simple test. Point at an
object with both eyes open. If the image
moves when you close your right eye, but
stays still when you close the left eye, then
you have a right ‘master eye’. If, on the other
hand, the image does not move when you
close the right eye, but moves when you
close the left eye, you have a left ‘master
eye’. Most right-handed male shooters have
a right ‘master eye’ which allows them to
shoot with both eyes open. This gives them
a wider field of vision and a greater facility
to judge range than they would have with
just one eye open. Likewise, most left-handed
male shooters have a left ‘master eye’,
which gives the same facilities as above.
There are, however, complications in
gun fitting: for example, a right- or a lefthanded
person, when tested, may have cyclopic
or central vision, that is to say he has
eyes with equal pulling strength, necessitating
a stock shaped as if to serve a functional
eye in the middle of the forehead. Readers
will notice that the above description relates
to male shooters, and they are not necessarily
applicable to lady shooters.
As a working gun-fitter, Fred Buller has
been able to corroborate Kidwill’s findings
over decades—but this curious anomaly
merits an explanation. Little study other
than anecdotal observation has been made
of male and female shooters. In this regard,
however, some observations on the differences
between certain abilities of men and
women may be pertinent. Some of the answer
to this apparent riddle is as follows.
Essentially, what has been found is that
some women actually shoot better with one
eye closed, as opposed to men who may
shoot better with both eyes open. This is yet
another difference between the functional
ability for certain talents in men as opposed
to women. It has long been recognised that,
as well as the expected gender differences,
there are many biological differences between
men and women as, some years ago,
the late Professor Norman Geschwind of
Harvard, and I myself have noted independently.
In our neurological clinics there
seemed to be an association between lefthandedness
and certain biological characteristics,
with obvious gender differences.
For example, autism, dyslexia, stuttering or
allergic disorders such as severe hay fever
or asthma were not only increased in lefthanded
individuals, but showed a striking
preponderance of affected males.
When we consider the development of the
brain, it is known that, usually by six to seven
weeks after conception, the brain begins to
take on a male or female form. In the main,
the sex genes determine whether the brain
will be male or female, but they themselves
do not solely guarantee the gender of the
child, which depends on the interaction of hormones with the brain. In other words,
whatever the genetic makeup of the embryo,
the foetus will develop as a male only if
testosterone is present. At six weeks after
conception (and at adolescence) there will be
enormous surges of testosterone. If testosterone
is absent, the brain develops along female
lines. If the brain is that of the female
pattern, little change will take place, but if it is
a male brain then certain anatomical changes
will begin to develop. Testosterone alters the
way in which the brain is finally constructed.
We now come to the concept of cerebral
dominance—the superior capacity of each
hemisphere of the brain to acquire particular
skills. Dominance differs between men
and women: for example, most men who are
right-handed have dominance for speech,
language and motor function in the left
hemisphere, while the right hemisphere
controls visual and spatial ability and deals
with abstract forms, shapes and patterns.
When right-sided brain damage occurs in
men and women, it is striking that men are
severely incapacitated for spatial IQ tests,
while women with the lesion in the same
part of the brain are hardly affected.
Men with a left-sided stroke, or damage
to the left hemisphere, lose a great deal
more of their language ability than women
with damage to the same anatomical site.
This indicates that, in women, language and
spatial skills are more diffusely distributed
through the brain, whereas in males they are
more focally located. Men’s brains are said
to be more specialised. In men, the left side
of the brain deals almost exclusively with
verbal function and the right side, in visual
function. Women use both hemispheres for
all functions. In neuropsychological tests using
three-dimensional shapes, boys perform
better when the data is exclusively presented
to the left eye (which feeds directly into the
right hemisphere) while for girls, either eye
can assess the problem equally. It is a common
observation that women have the ability
to take in a great deal at a single glance.
Eye dominance, however, is by no means
an all-or-nothing affair, and is less easily
measured than hand dominance for skilled
movements. There are now standardised
tests for assessing eye dominance but these
have not yet been used to discover the
shooting abilities of men and women.
Shooting ability is clearly influenced by
eye dominance. The fact is that individuals
who are right-handed, but with left eye dominance,
or left-handed with right eye dominance
will not learn marksmanship skills as
readily as individuals who have matched eye
and hand dominance. Formal studies have
indeed shown that right-handers with right
eye dominance are better marksmen than
are right-handers with left eye dominance.
Examples of this are seen in other sports—for example in cricket, where batsmen
with matched eye-hand dominance are more
successful than others. The pattern, therefore,
of eye-hand dominance seems to be related
to athletic proficiency in general. Further,
there is evidence in men that some may
be very good at shooting static targets but
poor at dealing with moving ones. This
knowledge comes from fighter pilot training
during the war. Many pilots (perfectly capable
as fliers) turned out to be poor at shooting
enemy aircraft. It became normal to identify
and transfer such pilots from Spitfires
and Hurricanes to Typhoons and Tempests,
which were developed for attacking ground
targets. Shooting at static targets against a
rich background, such pilots shot well. Were
they mostly weakly lateralised left-handers
with mixed dominance, one wonders?
There are well-recognised differences between
men and women for certain tasks and
abilities. Neuropsychologists have shown
that there is a definite superiority of females
in carrying out simple tasks such as the
speed of colour naming, and tests which call
for rapid perception of details and frequent
shifts of attention. Studies of students at
high school show that females have a clerical superiority and young girls have a greater
ability than young boys in tasks using fine
manual dexterity. Most people accept with a
chuckle that females are superior to males
from childhood onwards in verbal
functions, as they are in reading.
On the other hand, males usually
perform better than females due
to their superiority in special spatial
skills, particularly after puberty. By
spatial ability is meant the capacity to
see and picture objects regarding their
size, shape, relative position and relationship
to each other. It seems to be related
to the male hormone, ie testosterone,
since adult male patients who had suffered
delayed puberty because of low levels of
male hormones perform less well on spatial
tasks than do healthy male volunteers with
normal sex hormone levels. A reasonable
generalisation, therefore, is that females
perform better than males in verbal tasks,
verbal fluency, articulation and spelling,
while males are superior at visuo-spatial
tasks, where they can differentiate simultaneously
between many different forms.
It can be seen therefore that there are sex
differences in neurological function, which
represents the outcome of interaction between
several different factors, the most
important being sex hormones. These
help to explain the differences between
women and men in shooting ability.
Observations at Sandhurst Military
College showed that males
had a marginally greater
ability at shooting than
females, but there have
not been formal studies.
Several attempts
over the years have
been made to explain
these differences.
Some cite
socio-cultural
factors—that in the course of upbringing
boys receive more exposure to visuo-spatial
skills than girls. Others cite evolutionary
pressures—women stay at home while men
go out hunting, shoot with arrows, throw
spears, and so forth. In other words, the activities
of men have given them an evolutionary
edge on women for these specialised
tasks. But the first tenets of socio-cultural
skills can be dismissed, since they would not
explain the differences in animals, only in
humans, and it would be impossible to determine,
in the Darwinian sense, whether
they are evolutionary in origin.
The fact is that the foetal prototype brain
is female, and in the early stages the nervous
system is undifferentiated. Foetal testicular
hormones in males act on the brain and as a
result cause changes in function. The observed
differences in shooting ability between
men and women is yet another
of these hormonally induced differences
in brain function.
Professor P O Behan MD, DSc,
FACP, FRCP, is Professor Emeritus
of Clinical Neurology
and Senior Research Fellow at
Glasgow University. His coauthor,
Fred Buller, is retired
managing director of Frederick
Beesley, the gunmakers.
|
