When I was in high school back in the Mesozoic Era, we were made to take CPR courses, not optional. These courses were operated by the Red Cross and always included other basic first aid such as compression and/or tourniquet for bleeding, how to splint a broken limb if needed, how to put together an ad hoc litter to carry an injured someone out of a situation, etc. No one was learning how to do a thoracotomy in the field or anything like that, but we were certainly learning enough to know how to stop someone from bleeding out from the femoral artery in such a situation.
Of course, this was all old hat to me by high school because I had learned all of this in the Boy Scouts, back when that institution was still worth a shit.
Interesting stat I heard about a week ago on the radio: something like 90% of all shooting deaths occur not from organ damage, but instead from bleeding out within 4 minutes of being shot. Now, of course, a lot of that is internal bleeding and there's not much anyone can do about a shredded aorta with just everyday items laying around, but there are plenty of cases in which a student and/or a teacher could jump in with the right training (and it's pretty simple training, all things considered) and keep someone from bleeding to death before the ambo gets there.
