That barrel would be going into clear poly and be repurposed as a paperweight.

Short update.

I sent Ruger some photos and asked if they could review and render a judgement on cause. They responded that 'we reviewed the photos and cannot make any determination from them, but if you send us the gun we can make another attempt'.

I felt like the lawyers were involved and it was not going to go anywhere and I opted to not pursue this. I wasn't after compensation and I'm not hurt so no need to wrestle with Ruger.

Academy assigned my incident to a 3rd party investigative service that they use to deal with product failures, damages, injury, etc. as a result of using products Academy sells. The rep asked me a lot of questions, including purchase date and cost of the ammo and pistol.

Yesterday I received a short email with a waiver / release attached, in exchange for $440. I had no issue signing the release and was told the check is in the mail.

In the meantime, I determined that the serialized part was undamaged, and I bought a parts kit on Gunbroker that included every part BUT the serialized part. I reassmbled it yesterday and will take it to the range soon for a function check.

Using another brand of ammo.

FYI, about an hour after the incident I went back to the range to collect any spent cases, parts or bullets that would have been forward of the shooting station. The range officer / employee had already picked up pieces of the gun but whatever cases they found were dumped into a 5-gallon bucket with other non-related cases. I sifted through that and collected all I could find of the headstamps I was shooting but maybe I missed some, maybe they missed some, and no possibility of identifying the suspicious case is possible at this point. They did look for the projectile(s) and found none, suspecting that they made it into the ground rubber bullet stop and lost forever.