The intended use case is for the police to carry this, not ambulances:
He said it was key for the first people to a stabbing, which is often the police, to stop excessive blood loss while they wait for paramedics to arrive.
So maybe the debate people are having about this detail is a moot point?
The only real issue I see with this is it’s actual applicability most stab victims get stabbed multiple times, often in the same area plugging one hole might not do you good when there are 5 more around it, heck the balloon might exacerbate the bleeding from adjacent injuries.
This device may be technically cool but simply not practical in application for a long list of reasons. Logistics, what works in practice given humans being human, etc may make this a nice idea in theory but not practice.
Stab wounds are particularly ugly. I used to pay accident claims and our payouts were not designed to adequately address stab wounds. Pay was based on length of the cut requiring sutures and stab wounds are often small in size, may go unsutured while they try to prevent gangrene from taking hold and have various other challenges to both treatment and trying to figure out how to classify them for purposes of trying to pay for the treatment.
I'm sympathetic to the inventors horror at stab wounds but a lot of medical stuff is just not as simple and straight forward as we would like it to be.
I'm not trying discourage the use of this. I have no power to make policy or decisions of that sort. HN is just an online discussion forum and I know something about medical topics and for the conversation to be at all meaningful, you at least need to be talking about what is actually being proposed. I was just trying to nudge the discussion in that direction.
Is this lack of training? Where were the police earlier, before the gangsters shot each other? There is already evidence they delay care and harm outcomes, and they do not change what they do, so why would they carry life saving devices? They don't, because like with drug addiction, public health isn't commensurable with modern law enforcement.
On the flip side, nobody is really satisfied with the idea that it takes a trauma surgeon to save you. You're right that it takes skills, but not skills that a paramedic, a nurse or many other people have.
Although it takes a surgeon to save someone from a serious wound, I am very skeptical of the suggestion (perhaps unintentionally implied?) that an EMT or first responder can't do anything to improve outcomes except transport the patient fast. There is a whole list of things they train combat medics to do and none of them involve an operating theater.
Dealing with the previous fallout of gangsters shooting each other.
If a cop didn't do what they could to save someones life where I'm from, it would be a huge scandal...