There was no chapter division at this point in the 1830 edition, and beginning at this point separates the statement that “they did not establish a king” from the context that prompted it, which was the immediately preceding verse (3 Nephi 6:30) which said that the people who took over the government wanted to “establish a king over the land.”
There was an attempt to change the nature of the government of the Nephite people. What it accomplished instead was the destruction of the Nephite government, and therefore the dissolution of the Nephite people as a nation. This is Mormon’s ultimate message about the Gadiantons. They destroy nations. He has already declared that the secret combinations destroyed the Jaredites, and tied those same secret combinations to the Gadiantons.
Although we will see that there will again be Nephites, Mormon tells us that before Christ appeared, they had been destroyed through the influence and actions of the Gadiantons. As a writer who believed in cycles of history, Mormon wants his audience to understand that just as the Gadiantons caused the destruction of the Nephites in the thirtieth year of the reign of the judges, that they will also cause the destruction of the Nephites in Mormon’s time. Mormon foreshadowed that lesson in Helaman 2:13-14:
“13 And behold, in the end of this book ye shall see that this Gadianton did prove the overthrow, yea, almost the entire destruction of the people of Nephi.
14 Behold I do not mean the end of the book of Helaman, but I mean the end of the book of Nephi, from which I have taken all the account which I have written.”