Never again. Since the end of the second world war, Jews the world over have pledged that the Holocaust can never happen again.

The guns rights lobby has perverted this pledge for their own use – to advocate against stricter gun safety laws. The NRA's Wayne LaPierre has argued that firearm registration in Germany in 1938 helped lead to the Holocaust. Charlton Heston rallied NRA members by connecting gun rights with the Holocaust by declaiming "first comes registration and then confiscation". At the NRA convention this past May, conservative media personality Glenn Beck likened New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to a Nazi. And just in the last couple of weeks, former cop and pro-gun pundit Frank Borelli, speaking on NRA News, applauded sheriffs in Maryland who refused to enforce that state's recently adopted gun safety laws by distinguishing them from Nazi guards who followed orders in the death camps.

As a resident of Sandy Hook and the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, I find the NRA's attempt to draw on the Nazis' annihilation of my ancestors to further their political and business objectives to be dishonest, offensive and callously calculated to scare Americans into fighting laws that will save lives.

My grandparents met on a train fleeing Poland. They fell in love and married; my mother was born in Riga in the Baltic states in 1942. To escape death from the Nazis in Riga, my grandmother took my mom to Moscow and placed her in a Catholic orphanage where she remained until after the war. My grandparents and mother lived because they were able to move between the shadows, remain a few steps ahead of the SS, and they received assistance from non-Jews, who risked their lives to help them. Their survival had nothing to do with a gun.

My grandparents and my mother immigrated to the United States when my mom was 18, and my grandmother learned that two of her brothers had survived and were living in Buffalo, New York. Although my grandfather had fought in the Israeli army, including during the war of independence, in all the years he lived in the United States, he never owned a firearm. My mother not only never owned a gun, but did not allow my brother or me to have BB guns or toy guns in the house. After seeing what happened in my town of Sandy Hook, she is now a staunch supporter of gun safety legislation.

Yes, that's right, a Holocaust survivor supporting background checks.

I am certain if my grandparents were alive today, they too would advocate for background checks and other common sense measures to reduce gun violence. They would not fear registration – the Manchin-Toomey proposal specifically prohibited it. They would point out that Maryland sheriffs enforcing gun safety laws are not the same as Nazi guards following orders to murder Jews. In fact, it is just the opposite, as the new laws in Maryland will save lives.

Unfortunately, the only similarity between Nazi Germany and Sandy Hook is that innocent children were executed. However, even that comparison is not fair. In Nazi Germany, the government-sponsored genocide resulted in the systematic murder of more than 6 million Jews. It is so different than anything related to the gun safety debate that the NRA's use of imagery from that dark era should be dismissed as fear-mongering rhetoric.

As Americans, we should not tolerate the politics of fear. Instead, we should focus on the fact that way too many children are dying. Shortly after 12/14, the date of the Sandy Hook mass shooting, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote: