I'm sorry to hear about your friends, that super sucks.
I still have to disagree on the numbers though... London had 112 homicides in 2024 with 72 involved a knife. It's got about 9 million people.
Chicago has 2.6M but had 804 homicides, 84% involving guns.
I just don't think the number of events go up nearly enough to offset the fewer deaths per event... and guns just make it so much easier to successfully murder someone. If someone wanted to do you harm, I'm sure you'd much rather they had a knife than a gun.
Making it harder to kill people by restricting firearms is still a massive win by the data.