There's much less opportunity to attack someone with a knife and it involves a lot more personal risk. You're likely to get stabbed back unless they're totally unprepared. It's much more difficult to do a "drive by knifing".
1. You can't remove all guns, you can only remove the legal ones.
2. If you had the ability to remove illegal guns from society you would have had the ability to remove the criminals in the first place.
3. Even if you did remove the millions of guns and prevent manufacturing / imports (even though you can't for drugs) you don't know for certain murders will go down. These people are ruthless. Jumping people with machetes is always an option. It may be worse since guns are an equalizer and let people defend themselves. You're a lot less likely to run up on someone when you know they have a gun.
you do know when they don't have access to guns in prison they then shank people with whatever they can sharpen, right?