It has been said before, and by people smarter than me, that your eyes give you information. When it comes to shooting a firearm quickly and accurately, that information is critical in that it tells you when the gun is on target and there is reason to fire the gun. That reason may be that you're shooting a bullseye, getting ready to ethically harvest game, or attempting to save your life. Without the proper information, you won't do well at any of those tasks.
If you do much reading of opinion by high level shooters, you'll note that many don't care if you shut one eye or not when you shoot. Such notables as Gabe White and Tim Herron have both stated that closing one eye is not problematic if it allows the shooter to get hits. I personally have seen some very high level shooters use such techniques as squinting or shutting one eye to accomplish some or all of their shooting.
Note that the eye closing or not is a very personal thing and depends on a lot of factors. The old adage, "see what you need to see to get your hits," which I attribute to Brian Enos, encapsulates a lot. One of the things inherent in that statement is YOU. He doesn't say "see like I see in order to get your hits." Everybody's brain and eyes work a little differently, and so what works for him, Tim, Gabe, or me, may or may not work for you.
What I've come to realize is that the best thing to accomplish is finding the right amount of information in order to work most efficiently. For a lot of newer shooters, both eyes open gives them too much information, and they can't process it all in a timely fashion. They can certainly learn how to shoot with both eyes open, but unless they're going to practice more than once or twice a year, the odds of them changing that substantively are low. Any time you are trying to modify such visual cues for your shooting, you are really re-training your brain to work with a different amount of information, and that can take time and repetition to accomplish.
A related topic is sighting systems. Iron sights, especially on handguns, are low information/low communication devices. What I mean by that is that slight movement by the shooter is often not perceived through that sighting system. Shooters using that sort of system have to work harder to glean more subtle cues from that sighting system. Red dots, most especially on handguns, are high information/high communication devices. They show you quite clearly your smallest movements, from your respiration to your pulse to your grip doing weird things during your trigger press. With rifles a red dot may fall back to somewhere in the middle, whereas a magnified optic is most definitely a high information/high communication device. Making standing hits on longer range targets often benefits from dialing that magnification down, because magnification magnifies EVERYTHING, both the good and the bad.
The challenge with any of those sighting systems is getting the right amount of information from it to make your hits, without getting either too much or too little information. What I call "right sizing" the information in order to get your hits. With irons it often requires concerted effort to work on follow through and shot calling. With a red dot it often requires concerted effort to shoot through the wobble of the dot. With a magnified rifle optic it requires picking the right amount of magnification and finding the best stability you can given your current position.
And lastly, back to the eyes. I've been asked repeatedly by students about it, and related topics. Just yesterday one of them said that they had been told they need to have both eyes open when they shoot because "tactical." (I'm paraphrasing, they were much more cogent and articulate than that.) I asked them if they could get good hits in a reasonable amount of time with both eyes open, or if that was a struggle for them, and they indicated that at this point in their shooting journey, they weren't getting good hits in the required amount of time. So I told them that if they were going to end up in a gunfight, only hits count, so maybe from that perspective, for them, closing one eye and landing bullets where they needed to go would be the most tactical of all.
I realized at some point that while I tend to shoot both eyes open a lot, when I'm shooting much smaller or distant targets, I still tend to close one eye. That applies to both iron sights and red dots, and you would think that it wouldn't matter. I suppose it probably doesn't, but what I'm doing by closing that eye is removing unneeded information from my process. That said, maybe you don't need to, but if you find yourself needing to adjust what you're doing with your eyes to get hits, don't concern yourself with it, just do it.
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