smoking gun

Often traced back to the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.

• "We have a theory, but we haven't found a smoking gun yet."
• "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.""
• "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."
• "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"
• "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."
• ""He can weasel out if^([sic]) it." Ibanez massaged her knuckles. "He can say Couch welshed on a deal, and didn't show, and that's why Karen got got. It isn't conclusive. I have another thing I can lay on him, but even the two combined won't do. We need a third smoking gun if we're really gonna smoke this son of a bitch.""