smoking gun

Often traced back to the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.[1][2]

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smoking gun (plural smoking guns)

1. (idiomatic) Evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute.

   We have a theory, but we haven't found a smoking gun yet.

   • 1992, Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown‎, →ISBN:

     When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to "explain."

   • 2003 January 9, Hans Blix, “Notes for Briefing the Security Council”, in UNMOVIC‎:

     I now turn to the role and results of our current inspections. Evidently if we had found any ‘smoking gun’ we would have reported it to the Council.

   • 2005 June 12, Michael Kinsley, “No Smoking Gun”, in Washington Post‎:

     It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq the year before he did so

   • 2021 June 9, Peter Beaumont, “Leading biologist dampens his ‘smoking gun’ Covid lab leak theory”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN:

     A Nobel prize-winning US biologist, who has been widely quoted describing a “smoking gun” to support the thesis that Covid-19 was genetically modified and escaped from a Wuhan lab, has said he overstated the case.