New York Daily News reporters Alyn Ackerman and Nancy Dillion seem to take great delight in “outing” the family of the nine-year-old girl who killed Charles Vacca in Arizona several weeks ago with a Mini Uzi submachine gun.

Those of the young girl’s friends who didn’t know that she shot and killed the range employee (Vacca was not a certified “instructor” with any organization to the best we can determine) certainly know it now that the Daily News named her parents and her hometown.

The devastated dad whose 9-year-old daughter accidentally killed an instructor with a mini Uzi is an ivy league-educated financial whiz from New Jersey, sources confirm.

A.M.*, 43, oversees investment funds worth $1.5 billion at Dixon Advisory, an Australian firm with an office in Jersey City, according to his firm’s website.

A neighbor said M and his family haven’t been seen at their tidy house in Weehawken since the ill-fated incident on Aug. 25.

“I feel awful for them. The poor kid,” neighbor Jeanette Young told the Daily News. “It’s a horrible thing. Can you imagine this kid, 9 years old, carrying this for the rest of her life?”

There was no need whatsoever for Ackerman and Dillion to reveal the identity of the family. They did so for three reasons.

1. Being radical leftists as most New York journalists are, they likely took great delight in promoting a class warfare angle to the story.
2. Keeping the story of this rare accident (it is the second machine gun accident in the United States since the National Firearms Act became law in 1934) helps promote the radical anti-gun agenda of the Daily News.
3. Naming the family is a form of punishment via public shaming and ostracism for a family that dared stray from the radical anti-gun orthodoxy that the Daily News promotes.

What the Daily News refuses to see—much less report—is that the strict anti-gun policies of New Jersey that have neutered an entire generation via absurdly restrictive and has kept them from having practical experience with both firearms and firearms safety.

One of the most common comments from gun control supporters to this horrible incident has been, “why was a nine-year-old shooting a gun?” because they hate all firearms and recoil with horror to the thought of any child touching any gun.

The most common comments from shooters—especially experienced shooters and firearms instructors in particular—have been, “why was a nine-year-old shooting this gun, why wasn’t it tethered, why wasn’t he controlling the weapon, and why did the employee allow her to have that many rounds in the gun?” They ask these questions because they understand that some firearms are perfectly appropriate for children to shoot under competent adult supervision… and that a Mini Uzi submachine gun isn’t it.

It is very telling that both of the machine gun shooting deaths in the past 80 years have happened relatively recently, have involved children, and have largely been the fault of gun-ignorant parents wanting their children to have an experience that parents with a decent amount of “gun sense” simply would not allow because they know how guns and gun safety work.

In 2008 in Connecticut, Dr. Charles Bizilj insisted that his son Christopher be allowed to fire a Mini Uzi, twice ignoring suggestions to use a less powerful weapon.  Christopher could not control the compact submachine gun designed to be used by highly trained military, law enforcement, and diplomatic security personal. The gun rotated in his grip and killed him.

The recent incident at  the Arizona’s tourist trap involving the nine-year-old was eerily similar.

The family wanted the young girl to fire another Mini Uzi. The range employee had her fire a single shot on semi-automatic before switching the untethered gun to fire full auto. The only difference in the outcome is that the girl’s grip on the firearm was different, and so when the SMG recoiled out of her control it went up and to the left and killed range employee Charles Vacca instead rotating straight back, killing the girl.

In both instances, the parents made the bad decision to allow their children to shoot a submachine gun. In both instances, poorly trained range employees (in the Bizilj case, just a 15-year-old boy) broke commonsense SMG training protocols that they were likely never taught.

Tellingly, while machine guns are legal to own in many states in the country (provided NFA rules are followed) and there are an estimated 125,000 machine guns like the Uzi owned by private citizens, the only two recorded accidental fatalities in the past 80 years involving automatic weapons.  They both involved children raised by parents in states where “gun sense” is incredibly rare, where gun ownership is highly regulated, and where neither parents nor children have much of an idea how to handle firearms safely.

States like New Jersey and Connecticut that do everything in their power to restrict the right of their citizens to own firearms also impose firearms ignorance upon their citizens.

Unfortunately, such ignorance is all too often terminal.

* Bearing Arms will not reproduce the name of the family out of a basic sense of human decency. The young girl has been through enough.