The facts are the facts.
How do criminals get their guns? How many people become criminals, who had never committed a crime in the past, because they have a gun? How do our laws address the answers to these two questions? These questions have factual answers that can be determined through analysis. We can both agree that we want to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals, and we want to allow law abiding citizens to have those same firearms. We need thoughtful analysis to determine solutions and courses of action, not hyperbole and rhetoric.
If someone simply says there's nothing we can do, any law will only harm the security of individual citizens that's simply rhetoric. Likewise, if someone says we need to ban all assault rifles, or rifles of similar type as the kind used during the recent school shooting that doesn't really address the real problem of gun crime as most gun crimes or crimes committed with guns are done with pistols. That's also probably just rhetoric.
frontline: hot guns: "How Criminals Get Guns" | PBS
This PBS report using data from the ATF for example shows that the majority of pistols used by criminals or on the illegal market are actually sold by perfectly legitimate gun dealers, who sell their product illegally. That seems like a good starting point because if we shut down or deal with those rogue licensed gun dealers, than we can hamper the amount of guns sold through illegal sales to individuals who couldn't acquire one legally. It wouldn't affect the every day citizen who, if his local gun store is shut down for being one of these rogue dealers, he can simply go to another gun store that plays by the rules and acquire the same weapons.
This is what I mean by facts, looking at the statistics and the information available and figuring out ways to solve the problem or mitigate it at least.