There was something about the way Tyrek Jenkins was killed that struck a chord.

The 19-year-old was walking home from a Pleasant Grove convenience store, where he'd gone to get snacks for his fiancée and their child, when he was gunned down Wednesday night.

This young man, who'd recently landed a new job with Amazon and rekindled his faith, had a promising life ahead of him. He was, according to his grandfather, the Rev. Ronald Wright, a kid who had his head on straight, his heart in the right place.

"Him and his brother were just good, quiet kids, good boys," Wright told WFAA-TV.

That's why his mother, Yeneka Younger-Robinson, was struggling to understand what happened — and why?

"You didn't take his money. You didn't take his phone," she said in an interview with WFAA. "You took his life."

The shooting, for now, looks like another senseless murder stemming from a long and disturbing string of drive-by attacks in southern Dallas.

"What you have, and what people don't understand, is that you have a war going on between Pleasant Grove and Oak Cliff," said Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway. "It's like a gang-type deal where they will come over and just shoot" anybody.

Caraway couldn't get into the details, but he said the gang battle "is being addressed in a major way" by our new police chief, Renee Hall, who just reorganized her command staff.

Caraway is getting ready to launch an initiative — called "Can You Make it to 40?" — aimed at tackling root issues that are leading too many young black boys and men down a path of destruction.

"That's why I said what I said about the NRA," Caraway said, reminding me of his call for the city to reconsider hosting the National Rifle Association's convention next year. "I ticked off a lot of people when I said that. And I said it's because of all this gun violence. We've got to figure out how we're going to get these guns out of youngsters' hand, and where they're coming from."

The illegal guns, without question, are a huge problem in southern Dallas, where a young mother of six was slain last month by a 15-year-old who held up a Dollar General store where she worked.

But the violence that's spilling out on the streets of southern Dallas and in other urban areas across America is a bigger and more complex problem than guns.

We've got to deal with the elephant in the room: the breakdown in stable neighborhoods and two-parent households that's leaving more kids vulnerable to negative influences.

"We as African-Americans and we as African-American leaders, preachers, teachers, doctors and lawyers — everybody — have to come together," Caraway said. "There's no value for life. We have too many going to prison, who don't live to see 40."

You can call it black-on-black crime if you want, because that is evident. But so, too, is white-on-white crime.

The reality is that most victims of violent crimes are killed by people in their own racial group. From 1980 through 2008, for example, 93 percent of black victims were killed by blacks and 84 percent of white victims were killed by whites.

Still, we can't ignore the disproportionate crime and violence that's plaguing older and poorer black communities across America, including right here in Dallas.

Wright, the senior pastor of God's Community Church of Joy and executive director of Justice Seekers Texas, put it this way after his own grandson was killed: "I can't get mad at what police officers do to you all the time, and you do it to yourselves and y'all don't say nothing," he told WFAA.

Bishop Omar Jahwar — who grew up in South Dallas and shepherds the Kingdom Worship and Restoration Church downtown — agrees. He's part of a new nonprofit, Urban Specialists, that was recently formed by southern Dallas residents to fight crime in the area.

Next month, the group is hosting a conference in Dallas called "Course Correction Conversation," that will deal with violence and instability afflicting black communities.

"'When you have an irrational narrative about who we are that's perpetuated by a lot more forces than a gun and a badge, a narrative that says it's OK, they are what they are, they are criminals, they are monsters, you expect these sort of foolish ideas to manifest," he said. "We can't let this irrational violence become the norm."

What we have to do, Jahwar said, is work to stabilize black families and black neighborhoods that will help keep kids on the right track.

"If you start telling everybody we're living in the jungle, everybody starts becoming more savage rather than more human," he said. "We have to change the language, the culture and the narrative."