At a glance that all makes sense, except that firearms, particularly stolen pistols, are highly sought by the scum, mostly because they a cant buy one at the store unlike everything else you mentioned.
Firearms are the one thing that no matter how much money you have if you have a felony you cant buy it legally, therefore pistols are top prize items on the street, bring good money, and are likely worth the risk to take from you.
Yes, a OC'er could easily be targeted because of his gun. Simple as that.
That sounds good but, if that were the case proponents of the "you'll be targeted" theory should be able to come up with long lists of examples of people being targeted specifically for their firearms. So far we've got two.
It may be difficult for a felon to obtain firearms from a legal source (a little bit different from the "cant buy it legally" which is impossible by definition) but that's why there's a booming trade in illegal guns.
Back in the 80's NBC (I think it was) did a "special report" tracing one gun from crime to crime over a number of years and several states. They were using it in an attempt to show how bad guns were and we needed to get them off the street. What the report showed to
me was how few guns are really needed to "serve" criminal uses of them as one gun gets sold/passed from criminal to criminal to criminal and used again and again and again.
As for the "good money", how much? Source please. I have: More than half of arrestees say guns easy to obtain illegally: (
http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/163496.pdf) Specific prices for Glocks: $300-500 (
http://richmondconfidential.org/2010/11/09/every-gun-has-a-story/) not too far from their legal price (last time I checked, which has been a while, so stipulated), much less than a nice rolex will bring on ebay and less than one can net from jacking a car to be stripped.
And so the "you'll be targeted for your gun" argument really seems to be one of those theoretical things that just doesn't seem to be happening.
Yes, if somebody does pull of a successful robbery, they'll take your gun too. But they'll almost certainly do that whether you OC or CC. It's the targeting specifically
because they see you carrying that I question.