How to do 2 player simulatanous touch?

I have a 2 player on the go, and both players shoot weapons via touch actions (touch and slide on the player and the weapon fires).

However, both cant work at the same time. If you try to touch both players (on opposite sides of the screen) and drag them, they touch action will jump back and forth between them so they’ll both flicker around.

Can you split the screen so touch actions act independently on each side? or is there another, better way to have 2 touch actions going on at once?

I notice now that this same thing makes it so I can’t have two touch buttons active at the same time (ie when you make a fake controller buttons that hover in a fixed UI layer to control your player). That means you can’t jump and move forward at the same time (when you’re moving forward and hit jump, it just jumps upwards then when the jump is complete the player is stopped until you hit another button).

Am I missing how to activate multi-touch? or is it actually limited like this?