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One of my favorite parts in the movie, Casablanca, is at the very end, when Rick, the Humphrey Bogart character, shoots Gestapo officer Major Strasser in the presence of the local police captain.

Captain Renault is standing there as Rick kills the Nazi officer to prevent him from stopping the airborne escape of Victor Laszlo, a Czechoslovakian freedom fighter, and Ricks old flame, Ilsa, from Casablanca.

Other police officers arrive at the airport momentarily after the shooting while Rick and the police captain are standing at the edge of the runway with the dead Nazi officer on the tarmac.

Major Strassers been shot, the police captain announces to his underlings.

Then he exchanges a look with Rick, a look that says he intends to cover up what happened.

Round up the usual suspects, the police captain tells his men.

I was thinking of that scene after reading the way-too-brief Report of the Governors Task Force on Citizen Safety and Protection, the product of the make-believe evaluation of the states Stand Your Ground gun law.

When Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager was shot and killed in February by George Zimmerman, an over-zealous community watch volunteer in Sanford, state officials scrambled to tamp down the well-deserved furor that erupted over the states seven-year-old reckless gun law, which Zimmerman cited as his rationale for killing Martin.

And Gov. Rick Scott, playing the role of Captain Renault in Casablanca, arrived at a quick solution to the mess.

Round up the usual suspects.

The state task force looking into the wisdom of the NRA-inspired 2005 law would be led by Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, the lifetime NRA member who also co-sponsored the shoot-em-up law when she was in the legislature. And her fellow panel members would include Sen. David Simmons, the legislator who wrote the bill and Rep. Dennis Baxley, a professional mortician with a 100 percent rating by the NRA, who sponsored the bill in the house.

(By the way, shouldnt it be a conflict of interest for an undertaker to advocate reckless gun laws?)

And thats not all. Another usual suspect that got a seat on the panel was Rep. Jasper Brodeur, who has the honor of having sponsored the NRAs must ludicrous legislative stunt in Florida: the short-lived unconstitutional law that prevented pediatricians from asking young parents if they had any guns in their homes.

The 17-member panel was guided by leaders who could be counted on to go through the charade of a public inquiry while not actually doing much second-guessing of the law they wrote, promoted and voted for. And Scott, in announcing the panel, framed his idea of the panels mission in a way that hinted at the result it would yield this month.

I am a firm supporter of the Second Amendment, Scott said while announcing the task force in April. I also want to make sure that we do not rush to conclusions about the Stand Your Ground law or any other laws in our state.

So its little surprise that the task force didnt shoot any holes in the law. It wouldnt have been hard to do.

For example, how about this recommendation?

Create a system to track self-defense claims in Florida. Floridians need to know the actual effects of the law and how it is working across the state. A system to track the number of self-defense claims and the case outcomes would assist in doing so.

The task force guided by the usual suspects didnt come up with that recommendation. That was a recommendation from a second task force convened by Sen. Chris Smith, who tried to get on the real task force but didnt get picked.

That recommendation was based on the sound notion that if you want to see the effect of the Stand Your Ground law, a law that emboldens citizens to shoot if they imagine their life is in danger during confrontations in public, just look at the seven-year history of cases in Florida.

Its not like the numbers are a mystery. Theyre just inconvenient to the supporters of the law.

David Hemenway, the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, wrote a piece that summed up the findings of multiple studies showing that stand-your-ground gun laws dont deter crime and have a troubling racial component in the way they are prosecuted.

In the Stand Your Ground states, when white shooters kill black victims, 34 percent of the resulting homicides are deemed justifiable, while only 3 percent of deaths are ruled justifiable when the shooter is black and the victim is white, Hemenway wrote.

The Tampa Bay Times looked at the nearly 200 times this law has been invoked in Florida cases and found that most people who use this defense have a criminal arrest record and one-third have had an arrest for threatening someone with a gun.

The law has been used to free gang members, drug dealers fighting with their clients, and perpetrators who shot their victims in the back, Hemenway wrote. Indeed, in most of the Florida Stand Your Ground confrontations, the victim was not committing a crime that led to the confrontation, and was not armed.

Gov. Scotts right. You dont have to rush to conclusions about the law. But you do have to consider the regrettable carnage it has reaped during its seven-year history.

Unless of course, youre simply rounding up the usual suspects.

Somewhere, Captain Renault is smiling.

Read more:
Cerabino: Stand Your Ground panel does just that - Palm Beach Post