Penny Dean and Your Rights

For journalists, researchers and the general public, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention serves as an authoritative source of information about Americans’ health, including estimates of how many people are killed or injured by guns. The agency’s most recent figures include a worrying uptick: Between 2015 and 2016, the number of Americans nonfatally injured by a firearm jumped by 37 percent, rising from about 85,000 to more than 116,000. It was the largest single-year increase recorded in more than 15 years.

There is a staggering amount of data on our smartphones. So it's no surprise investigators want access to those phones as easily as possible. And we want our privacy. So smartphone companies, like Apple, have attempted to make phones as secure as possible, with passcodes, fingerprints, and now, facial recognition software.

People could face up to five years' in jail if they do not give their laptop password or mobile phone PIN to the authorities under proposed changes to the law.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton introduced the new laws to the Parliament, saying they are needed to help police and spies catch criminals who are hiding behind encryption technology.

But civil libertarians say the changes go too far.

LOS ANGELES – A Sierra Madre man who until earlier this year served as a lieutenant in the Pasadena Police Department has agreed to plead guilty to two federal felony offenses related to the illegal sale of more than 100 firearms over the course of three years.

Vasken Kenneth Gourdikian, 48, who resigned from the Pasadena Police Department in March after a 22-year career, has signed a plea agreement that was filed this morning in United States District Court.

Before you give the police a DNA sample, read an alarming new study of crime laboratories published this summer, the largest study of its kind.

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology gave the same DNA mixture to about 105 American crime laboratories and three Canadian labs and asked them to compare it with DNA from three suspects from a mock bank robbery.

People were crowding into the courthouse for the afternoon calendar when they heard gunfire just outside.

When the shooter started to come inside, chaos broke out -- people running, falling, yelling, crying. He shot four of them before police arrived, fired and killed him.

In the confusion, the survivors tried to make sense of it. This is not the way justice is supposed to work.

American denim giant Levi Strauss & Co. announced Tuesday that it is launching a series of new initiatives to benefit groups working to prevent gun violence.

Levi Strauss’s CEO and President Chip Bergh wrote in Fortune on Tuesday that the company “simply cannot stand by silently when it comes to issues that threaten the very fabric of the communities where we live and work.”

Grand jury indictments against a city of Llano police officer and a Llano County deputy are the latest in a series of criminal charges against the largest municipal police force in the county.

A Social Security judge shot and killed himself after an hours-long standoff with police at a home southwest of Miami, authorities said. Timothy Maher, a disability judge at a downtown Miami Social Security Administration office, held three hostages for about 10 hours Friday inside the home, police said.

Police heard a shot fired around 9 a.m. and officers finally entered the house, investigators said. Before that, the three hostages made it outside. They were described as family members but the exact relationship was not immediately clear.

Police found Maher dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Betsy DeVos' Education Department is considering allowing states to spend federal funds on guns and gun training for school personnel, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The administration began deliberating the move earlier this year after Texas and Oklahoma asked Education Department if schools could buy weapons using federal funds known as Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants, which are part of Title IV funding, a senior administration official and another source familiar with the matter told NBC News.