The following is an example of just how fast one's equipment can vanish if you let your guard down even for a moment in the wrong place.
This happened to me literally 25 years ago, long before I became a ham. I had been involved in CB some years prior to this, but got out of it when it became too popular in the mid-1970s. Then my wife bought for me a fancy, top end (at the time) SSB mobile CB rig for my car. I expended quite a bit of time and energy installing the radio and antenna, getting everything just right, and I was actually enjoying the thing (my job at the time had me on the road a lot, so it did make a difference on those long drives).
In the summer of '79 a friend of mine had been in a really serious car accident, and he was busted up pretty bad. A couple months went by, and he was on the mend, but he still could not walk (had to use a wheelchair), and was getting a terminal case of cabin fever, and generally driving everyone nuts.
Just to get him out of the house, I offered to take him to the drive-in movies (for those of you who remember such things...

. We went, and it helped him a lot just getting out of the house.
After the movies I took him home, jockeyed him into his wheelchair and pushed him back inside. The neighborhood he was in was not the best, with a lot of, shall we say, unsavory characters around. While I took my friend inside, like an idiot I left the car unlocked and the windows down, something that ordinarily I would never have done. But "it only took a second" to get him back inside.
Actually, it was about three minutes, and when I got back to my car, sure enough, the radio was gone, the coax and power cord cut. I was beside myself, and went back to my friend's house to tell them what happened. I didn't even close the front door while I talked to my friends, and when I turned around, damned if that thieving s.o.b. wasn't back at my car, his head stuck in the driver's side window, looking for something else to steal.
I took after him yelling, and of course, he ran off like a deer (amazing how fast he could run with those short little legs) into a nearby stand of trees.
As mad as I was, I didn't chase him into those trees, as I had spotted a couple of his buddies in there waiting for him (which meant there were probably a few more that I had not spotted). I may have been young and stupid at the time, but I knew what my probable fate would have been had I followed that clown in there, and I didn't want to end up in the hospital or dead over a CB radio.
So after loudly casting aspersions on their collective ancestry and masculinity along with a few other choice words, I drove off, mourning the loss of my pretty radio.
The moral of the story is, obviously, if you have your rig (or for that matter, anything else of value that can be easily carted away) in the car, even if it is in a mount, lock it up! Even if you are only going to be gone "a second", lock it up. Because as we have seen, a thief can rip you off faster than you can say "RF in the shack".
(As an aside, I am reminded of a story I heard years ago about Sen. Barry Goldwater K7UGA (SK). This was back in the 1980s and K7UGA had been at a meeting with the President at the White House. As he was leaving, some newsies corraled him at his car. One of them noticed the Senator's car was locked up, and made a smart-assed remark about "are you afraid someone will steal something out of your car in the Republican-held White House parking lot?" Goldwater just snorted and said, "Are you kidding? I have more electronics in this car than all of you have put together. Darn right I'm going to lock it up, no matter where I am", or words to this effect, slapping down the "reporter" well and truly, and then driving off. Gotta love it...

73 de N5MZL