When you decide someone gets to be a youth mentor, you should probably vet them very carefully.

On one hand, you want to keep out sexual predators for obvious reasons. You don't want to introduce people like that to children via your organization. It doesn't matter what the organization's mission actually is, though I'd say that if it's anti-violence, that s should be right up at the top of the list.

But if that's your mission, you should probably also make sure they're not a black-market gun dealer.

A Philadelphia anti-violence group apparently did not or was not able to do that, and now it's a whole thing as that one-time youth mentor has been sentenced.

A former member of the NOMO Foundation has been charged and sentenced for his role in a gun trafficking scheme, according to officials with the Department of Justice.

Officials said that 47-year-old Kyle McLemore, of Philadelphia, was sentenced to 10 years in prison followed by three years of supervised release and a $300 special assessment in connection to selling illegal firearms from South Carolina to Philadelphia.

McLemore is one of seven people who are accused of participating in a scheme that included buying illegal guns in South Carolina and transporting them to Philadelphia between November 2020 and February 2021, officials said.

Just months after being released on parole for a 1999 murder conviction, McLemore is accused of working with Terrance Darby to place the orders for the firearms with South Carolina prison inmate Ontavious Plumer, according to officials.

As part of the scheme, Plumer would tell others outside of the prison to buy the ordered guns from stores in South Carolina and to send them to Philadelphia, officials explained. Once the guns were in the city, McLemore, Darby and another person would resell the weapons.

So McLemore was connecting with at-risk youth through the NOMO Foundation and was selling guns to people who wanted to hurt others. How many of the kids he connected with bought guns?

That's not touched on, and we don't know that any ever did. If he were smart, he'd never sell a gun to anyone he worked with.

Then again, if he were smart, he probably wouldn't have been selling guns on the black market like this.

I'm more than a little annoyed by this, in part because I actually want to see these organizations succeed. I want them to curb violence in their communities because I believe that's the only way it'll happen. Gun control isn't the answer because, ironically, of people like one of NOMO Foundation's former folks selling guns illegally.

This helps no one.

Now McLemore is getting 10 years in the slammer, then another three under someone's watchful(-ish) eye.

Of course, how they figured a guy fresh out of prison for murder was the perfect candidate is beyond me. Yes, he should get a shot at proving he is reformed, but mentoring youth isn't exactly an entry-level kind of thing.

Still, they did and here we are.

One has to wonder just how many supposed anti-violence advocates are really just using it as a front to hide the ways they actually encourage the violence in their communities.