They sprayed him down with a who-gun

The whogun lay on the table. What it did was to turn an answer you thought you had - set in stone so to speak - into question that made you think twice about it as if you had not stumbled into your original set of presuppositions.  What is more, it raised questions that had never been asked before in an ever-proliferating fashion. Questions like: What if I had been to that Greek Isle before? Or, relating to other people: "How many romantic partners had she had before this point in time?" It was on occasion able to raise such compelling questions as to stir the stater of seemingly unchangeable facts into an apopleptic fit of mind-changing delirium, and at the last possible minute, before say a test or exam or important political speech. In fact, the who gun was a revolutionary weapon. Governments knew that if it got into the wrong hands, the jig was up. They could not risk that. So in 1869, the whogun and its inventor were promptly dispatched.