"The Private Investigators Licensing Board, their house is on fire."

It was hard to disagree with Nevada Certified Firearms Instructor Association President Andrew Cowie after watching the Legislative Commission tear apart Vincent Saladino, the board's executive director, last month. 

As reported by the Nevada Current, Saladino asked the commission to approve a set of updated regulations for licensees — such as private investigators, private patrol officers (security guards, in other words), process servers, repossessors, dog handlers, security consultants or polygraph examiners — that the Private Investigators Licensing Board had been working on for the past three years. 

One proposed update included a requirement for licensees to receive training in rifles and shotguns in addition to their existing handgun training.

Why did the licensing board want to train licensees in rifle and shotgun handling? According to Saladino, it's because the board had been allowing Nevada security companies to illegally equip guards with rifles and shotguns for years with no meaningfully sanctioned training whatsoever.

To accommodate the additional training, the board recommended increasing the mandatory amount of firing range training from five hours to eight (less than three hours per type of firearm), and replacing a host of technical skill requirements with, and I quote, "a passing score of 75 percent." The exact standards licensees would have to meet would be established and maintained by the board.

Lawmakers were alarmed. Sen. Robin Titus (R-Wellington), a gun owner and hunter, objected to the lackadaisical training regimen and declared that the proposed regulations were "not in the best interest of public safety." Sen. Melanie Scheible (D-Las Vegas) asked incredulously, "Are we talking about having private snipers available for private security?" Assm. Shea Backus (D-Las Vegas) asked if licensees would be permitted to carry an AR-15 after the regulation was updated.

"We do have licensed security companies that have employees that are utilizing these tools in the performance of their duties and we have no [regulations] at all for any minimum training at this time," Saladino replied.

Apparently the Private Investigators Licensing Board took the position that, in the absence of any regulations prohibiting usage of a tool, licensees are allowed to use whatever they have on hand. 

Its thinking goes like this: Handguns are regulated by the licensing board, so licensees have to meet certain requirements before using them on the job. Handcuffs, batons, pepper spray, rifles, shotguns, one-way attack drones, chemical or biological weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, space-based death rays or any other tool not explicitly defined as a "handgun," on the other hand, are permissible for licensees to use to protect the property of a homeowners association or to repossess a used Hyundai.

There are, however, a number of issues with this interpretation. 

First and foremost, the original regulations in question — which were adopted in 2013 — were written by the Private Investigators Licensing Board according to the state's administrative rulemaking procedures. If its interpretation of its own regulations was correct, that would strongly suggest the board lacked the competence needed to responsibly exercise its rulemaking authority. Surely rifles and shotguns, which wield far more penetrative power than a handgun, deserve greater regulatory scrutiny in the hands of someone being paid to wield them than handguns.

Much more importantly, however, the board was flatly incorrect in its interpretation. 

Current regulations prohibit licensees or their employees from carrying firearms while performing their duties unless they're a certified firearms instructor or they successfully complete board-certified firearms training. Since those regulations only permit firearms training for handguns, handguns are the only class of firearms that may be used by licensees while they're in the field.

In short, Saladino stated for the public record that his employer's licensees were breaking the law with the board's blessing.

"I was probably given incorrect legal advice," Saladino responded. He then opened the first of his figurative three envelopes and blamed his predecessor for the misinterpretation, claiming that "the previous director had instructed" the board that "since there's no regulation" for bringing rifles or shotguns to work, licensees can "still utilize those tools as well."

In the traditional telling of the three-envelope story (a high-ranking executive is handed three envelopes by their predecessor, who instructs them to open each envelope one at a time in case of an emergency), the executive has three to six months to open the first envelope, which tells them to blame their predecessor. Saladino, however, chaired a workshop in 2024 alongside the board's deputy attorney general, Chricy Harris, for the same regulation he presented to the commission last month. Presumably he should have at least moved on to the second ("Reorganize") or third ("Make three envelopes") envelope by now. 

It must be noted here that this is not the first time private investigators have adopted questionable interpretations of the laws and regulations that govern their industry. Robert Beadles, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who donated to several Republican causes a few years ago, hired private detectives to investigate several Northern Nevada politicians, including then-Washoe County Commissioner Vaughn Hartung and Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve. One private detective attached electronic GPS trackers to his targets' cars to surveil the politicians' movements for several months. This ultimately led the Legislature to pass a bill in 2023 prohibiting the practice.

More recently, follow-up reporting by the Nevada Current revealed that the licensing board is every bit as likely to invent phantom regulations and apply them against those it's responsible for regulating as it is to forget inconvenient regulations it wrote for itself. Namely, the board decided for itself outside of the state's administrative rulemaking procedures that employees can only receive firearms training with permission from their employers. Consequently, employers can decide for themselves who should receive firearms training and who shouldn't using any criteria they choose. Since firearms-certified security guards make nearly twice as much as unarmed guards, the lack of transparency has led to accusations of cronyism and discrimination.

Of course, if security guards can carry rifles or shotguns without any additional training or licensure, perhaps employers should stop paying for firearms training and just hand uncertified guards pump-action Remingtons. Their licensing board just said it was fine, after all.

More seriously, the board's mismanagement is just another glaring example of why Nevada's occupational licensing boards require oversight from a full-time branch of the state government, not an interim committee of part-time legislators. 

Though the Legislative Commission did an excellent job of holding the board accountable once given the opportunity, it did so more than two years after the board first proposed the regulations in question. Surely a few strategically placed state employees could have cleared all of this up sooner than that.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.