  It has recently been shown how tri-bimaximal neutrino mixing can be achieved,
using the see-saw mechanism with constrained sequential dominance, through the
vacuum alignment of a broken non-Abelian gauged family symmetry such as SO(3)
or SU(3). Generalising the approach of Altarelli and Feruglio developed for an
$A_4$ model we show how the reduction of the underlying symmetry to a discrete
subgroup of SO(3) or SU(3) renders this alignment a generic property of such
models. This means near tri-bimaximal mixing can be quite naturally
accommodated in a complete unified theory of quark and lepton masses.
