Barack Obama has said that Malcolm X was a foundation of his personal philosophy, a shaper of how he thought and, consequently, how he has lived.

 Malcolm X is seen by some as a great defender of equality and liberty, as a voice against oppression.

 A man who, fundamentally, wanted nothing more than to be free.

 A man who, under the laws of Democrats like Barack Obama and Andrew Cuomo, would be sent to prison if he were alive today.

 Literally.

 The irony – or hypocrisy – of the left is that those who most worshipfully speak of men like Malcolm X are the most adamant about passing laws that would have made him a felon and imprisoned him for most of his life.

 What am I talking about?

 His gun.

 Malcolm X had a gun, a gun he kept to defend his family, his home and himself.

 A gun that both Barack Obama and Andrew Cuomo would outlaw.

 We know about Malcolm X’s gun because there is a famous picture of him holding it. A photograph that was in “Life” magazine in March of 1964 and again in “Ebony” in September of that same year.

 In the picture, Malcolm X is holding the gun in his right hand, and pulling back the blinds on his window with his left hand. He was looking outside his Queens, New York, home to keep watch, to make sure mobs or assassins were not approaching.

 He had good cause.

 A year after the picture was taken, on Valentine’ Day 1965, his house was firebombed and, carrying that rifle, he ran with his wife and children to safety.

 And a week after that, on February 21, 1965, while giving a speech, with his family in the audience, Malcolm X was assassinated by a group of men from the Nation of Islam.

 But let’s get back to the gun and the gun banners.

 As he stands with his rifle in that picture, Malcolm X is committing four felonies under the gun laws proposed by Barack Obama and enacted by Andrew Cuomo.

 The first is that he is touching it.

 As a convicted felon who had spent more than six years in prison for breaking and entering, it would today be a felony for him to own or handle a firearm.

 The other three felonies are new creations, enacted recently for the state of New York and proposed nationally by Barack Obama.

 The gun is, under modern definition, an assault rifle. It is an M1 carbine, an infantry weapon designed for soldiers on the battlefield and, just 20 years before Malcolm X held his aloft, was carried by the millions in active combat.

 It kind of makes you wonder about arguments from Cuomo and Obama that military weapons don’t belong in the hands of civilians.

 But that’s two felonies.

 The other two have to do with the magazines. They are both 30-round high-capacity magazines and each of them is, under Cuomo’s new gun law, an E felony.

 Under Obama’s law, each would likewise merit a separate federal felony charge.

 Malcolm X has one magazine in his gun, and the second is taped to the first, so that when the first was emptied the second could quickly be inserted in the gun.

 If Barack Obama was to meet his hero, no doubt he would tell him that no hunter needs 60 rounds for his gun.

 If Malcolm X were to stand in his Queens living room today, and be photographed holding that gun, it wouldn’t be white racists or black assassins he’d have to worry about, it would be the police.

 It would be the government agents of Barack Obama and Andrew Cuomo.

 The Democrat gun bans being foisted on this country today would strip Malcolm X of the ability to defend his home and family.

 Just as they strip you of the ability to defend your home and family.

 Here is this hero of the left, one of the paragons of progressives, and he felt that a military assault rifle, with high-capacity magazines, was the best way to defend his family.

 He wasn’t a gun nut, he wasn’t a gang banger, he was a husband and a father. He was a free American.

 And a hero of Barack Obama.

 And yet, were he alive today, he would be less free than he was almost 50 years ago. Were he alive today, it wouldn’t be Jim Crow who was denying him a civil right, it would be the Democratic Party. Instead of a freer America after 50 years, thanks to the Left’s vendetta against the Second Amendment, we are more oppressed.

 Barack Obama has said no “reasonable person” would want an assault rifle. Andrew Cuomo said only “extremists” could oppose his gun ban.

 I wonder what Malcolm X would say to that.

 And I wonder how Cuomo and Obama and all the green-ribbon wearers explain that picture.