WA State CO NWPrepped is carrying a brand-new Glock 43 and an Olight M2T Warrior Tactical Flashlight. Nice to see he’s carrying a tourniquet, too. What do you guys thinks of the R.A.T.S. (Rapid Application Tourniquet System)?

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

21 COMMENTS

  1. I hate them. Not CoTCCC recommended. Dishonest “TCCC Approved” from a private company not associated with CoTCCC. Why be dishonest if you have a good product? No windlass to tighten. Too thin=too great of a chance of wounding. Get a CAT or SOF-TTW.

  2. Hate the RATS. Not fast enough to deploy by comparison to other tourniquets, and I’ve heard reports of them not being quite up to snuff. I do commend the use of the Olight, though. I love my M2R.

    • Exactly, carry basic first aid before a tourniquet. My murse has bandaids to battle dressings, no tourniquet.

      • I do carry a small FAK in my pocket, it’s just not pictured. it’s made by a company called WHTactical. Has some celox gauze, a swat-t tourniquet, duct tape and a boo boo kit with some band aids and wound closure strips. The whole kit easily fits in my cargo pocket.

  5. Thanks for the share. To the guys in the comments section, I recently upgraded my Rats tourniquet to a Softt-W tourniquet by tacmed solutions. I now keep the Rats tourniquet in my backpack as a backup.

    • I checked the SOFTT-W, looks a lot like the C.A.T. Stay safe.

  6. A belt,vwhats wrong with a belt and a stick?

  7. Finally an EDC with a tourniquet! I am unfamiliar with the RATS. I carry a C.A.T, and I have a SWAT-T as well. In my opinion the SWAT-T can take longer to apply if you had to apply it on your own arm vs the C.A.T. But any tourniquet you have a chance to use is better than no tourniquet, or the awesome tourniquet you left home or in the car.
    As simple as this EDC is, it is great! I would add a spare mag for the G43 however, please consider it.

  8. Folks, active shooters and other forms of terrorism are a real threat. I do not care where you live, it does not only happen in NYC, LA, London, or Paris. 3 years ago, 5 lost their lives in Chattanooga, TN. The city has a population of less than 200k. It can happen anywhere. If you are not carrying a tourniquet with your gun, spare mag, flashlight, and knife, no offense but you are nuts. If there is an active shooter medics will not get in to treat injured people until it is safe to do so, and cops will NOT try to stop you from bleeding to death as their mission is to find and neutralize the shooter(s). In other words, you bleed from an artery in this kind of situation, and you cannot apply a tourniquet you are dead, and your body will lay there for a long time.

  9. After recently attending a Stop the Bleed class put on by my county’s volunteer search and rescue team, I now carry a CAT. Larger than a multi tool, smaller than my carry gun, it is a minor inconvenience for the potential benefit. For less than $30 you can get a tourniquet, I highly recommend you pick one or more up to keep in your home, car, work, etc… $30 being a high quality name brand tourniquet, $15 or less for a Chinese knockoff.

  10. A Chinese knockoff that will break when you need it the most. Stick with the CAT gen 7 purchased from a reliable source like Medical Gear Outfitters or others, NOT Amazon. A real one will run about $29.00

  11. RATS is good to go. I carry one inside my 2 point sling (SierraTac) as a backup to CAT. Far better choice for kids than bigger TQs. Worth having a couple RATS and CATS.

  12. As a professional paramedic in a busy system I have deployed many a TQ. I can tell you first hand the “Rats” TQ should be removed from the market. It is absolute garbage in the real world. I have had to place CAT TQ and SOF-T behind it on two occasions. I can’t recommend the CAT TQ enough. It works and is fast to deploy with gross motor movements. As for the use of a belt, it can be done, but if you don’t have a good windless and you have not trained on it.. bad news. In addition, I have used a CAT TQ on a child’s arm as young as 7. Good luck trying to get a adult belt around that little arm… Like others have said, get a real TQ and stay far away from gimmicks…

  13. Not a fan of the Rat. I carry a SOFTT-W on my belt everyday. And I have four more TQs (mix of SOFTT-W and C-A-T) in my vehicle.

  14. Like anything you need to practice. Here is some recent data. Please read and check the sources. As for not CoTCCC approved, well they have TQs that work and are proven. They are not going to field a new TQ to try so you won’t get a recommendation. However it has its place and I’ll work.

    Following is an abstract of a paper submitted for the 2018 NAEMSP Scientific Assembly. Researchers used mannequins of different sizes and simulated child injuries. They then tested the effectiveness of various commercially available tourniquets and found that SWAT-T and RATS performed better on pediatric sized mannequins (children). You may read the full abstract below.

    Comparison of Commercial Tourniquets in a Pediatric Trauma Patient Model James Vretis, Center for Tactical Medicine

    Category of Submission: Pediatric

    Background: Young children and adolescents are frequently injured in peacetime and wartime. Reviews of trauma registries at U.S. military medical facilities during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts show as the age of a child a child decreases the injury severity and mortality increases. Tourniquet use for control of extremity hemorrhage in adult trauma patients is associated with increased survival with only minimal tourniquet associated morbidity. Use of commercial tourniquets on pediatric patients treated at US military facilities shows survival benefits similar to those seen in the adult population. Hypothesis: We hypothesized that there [would] be differences in the efficacy of commercial tourniquets designed for adults when applied to pediatric patients of different ages. Methods: The institutional Ethics Review Board approved the study. The study was a prospective and non-blinded test of nine commercial tourniquets on a pediatric arm hemorrhage test model using six sized mannequins to simulate pediatric arms. The Stretch Wrap And Tuck (SWAT), TacMed K9 (TMK9), and Rapid Application Tourniquet System (RATS) tourniquets apply compressive forces by the elastic recoil action of the tourniquet strap. The Combat Application Tourniquet (CAT), Sam XT (SAMXT), Tactical Mechanical Tourniquet (TMT), and the SOF Tactical Tourniquet – Wide (SOFTTW) use a windlass to increase circumferential compression by decreasing strap length. The Child Ratcheting Medical Tourniquet (CRMT) uses a ratchet and ladder mechanism for circumferential compression. The Mechanical Advantage Tourniquet (MAT) has a turnkey apparatus mounted on a fixed length C shaped housing that pulls a portion of the retaining strap into the housing as a mechanism to increase circumferential pressure.

    Results: The SWAT, TMK9 and RATS were successful stopping the flow of water on all sized mannequins. The CRMT was the only mechanical advantage tourniquet that was successful in stopping fluid flow on all mannequin sizes. The TMT and SOFTTW started failing on mannequins with 6.35 cm diameters. The CAT, SAMXT, TMT, and SOFTTW all failed on the 5.08 cm diameter mannequin. The MAT failed on the 7.62 and smaller diameter mannequin.

    Conclusions: We have shown that many commercially available tourniquets do not stop fluid flow in our pediatric arm hemorrhage test model.

    Source: Abstracts for the 2018 NAEMSP Scientific Assembly, Prehospital Emergency Care, 22:1, 123. https://doi.org/10.1080/10903127.2017.1377791

    All of the above tourniquets can be found in IsraeliFirstAid’s Tourniquets category.

Comments are closed.