Tourniquets ,,, ARE YOU SURE YOU'RE QUALIFIED?

Nice article about saving a life by applying a tourniquet.

Amid Chicago gun violence, public campaign aims to help keep victims from bleeding to death - Chicago Tribune:

 Doctors said that if Watson and his partner, Paul Moreno, hadn’t taken those steps after the October 2016 shooting, the teen probably would not have survived. Medical experts say anyone can employ a few basic techniques to achieve the same results when confronted with a life-and-death scenario. And a public service campaign called “Stop the Bleed” aims to do just that: teach bystanders to save someone’s life by learning basic blood-stemming techniques. Stop the Bleed is a national effort established by the White House in 2015 as one response to the Sandy Hook mass school shooting three years before. It aims to arm civilians with skills and bleeding control kits to provide crucial aid in an emergency until medical professionals can take over.

(EMPHASIS ADDED!)
I'm not sure I would have done that.

Not that I'm not a compassionate and caring person, but there are a couple of cautionary notes that YOU should be aware of before YOU apply a tourniquet to an injured and bleeding limb.

1. If you shut of the blood supply to a limb, the tissues in that limb will begin to die immediately because it isn't getting the blood it needs.  If you shut off the blood supply long enough (say, for the sake of discussion, 15 minutes) the limb may begin to atrophy. Read: "ROT".
2. If you save someone from bleeding to death, but in the process that person loses a limb due the drastic life-saving measures you undertook with the most humanitarian motives, you may be subject to a civil suit.  Unless you are a trained medical professional, you may lose the suit, should you choose to fight it.  It's like saving someone by kneeling on their chest so they can't breath ... you have possibly exacerbated the situation.  (Okay, that wasn't the best example, except that it was an 'emergency procedure' which you thought was appropriate ... except in that specific instance it wasn't.)
3. If/when you go to court, you might be congratulated for attempting to save live and/or limb, but that's in the first hour of testimony.   After a certain point, your attorney might suggest that you agree to a 'lesser' civil penalty (eg: agree to a $100,000 payment instead of contesting a $1,000,000 payment) because .. well, you DID apply a tourniquet to the young girl's arm, and she DID have her arm amputated because the flesh was necrotic.  If you had delayed in applying such an "extreme" measure, she may NOT have died from blood loss but she certainly would NOT have had her arm amputated in the next week.
4. ...

I'm not sure there is a "Point 4" here.  There are too many cautionary tales in the first three points, and I strongly suggest that you refer to other sources because I am neither a medical nor a legal professional; this is information which I received during "First aid/Traumatic Care" training in Basic, and again in NCOC training in the army.  (They weren't worried about civil penalties, they were worried about the best care for a wounded comrade. The training cadre envisioned much more frequent injuries, much more dramatic causes ... AK47 rounds or booby traps as the cause, which  cause injuries which are much more traumatic than, for example, a simple compound fracture.)  

[You should hear what they had to say about treating a wounded comrade who has had his jaw shot off!  STEP ONE: PULL HIS TONGUE OUT OF HIS THROAT AND TURN HIS HEAD TO THE SIDE, SO HE DOESN"T ASPHYXIATE HIMSELF OR DROWN IN HIS OWN BLOOD!]

Once again ... if you are concerned that someone may need your immediate care to keep from bleeding to death from some sort of lacerating injury ... go get professional training and earn some kind of certificate which documents that you HAVE been trained in this kind of emergency and you ARE qualified to make this kind of dramatic remedial care  (using a tourniquet on an injured limb).

If you don't do that, and you are faced with the situation and you do NOT apply a tourniquet ... and the patient suffers from your lack of care?  Guess what?  You're possibly still vulnerable from a lawsuit because of your refusal to apply whatever immediate care steps you might have been (sort of) trained in.