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slowmarch Crossbow murders in the UK? Very rare! I don't know easy it is to obtain crossbows legally, or even if they are legal, in Britain but they are nearly unknown; certainly outside of archery-clubs which I think anyway normally use long-bows.
Knives yes, most (not all, of course) are between young gangs caught up in obscenities such as drugs dealing. Large knives are easy to obtain - just steal one from the kitchen - but there are legal controls on buying any type of knife, including banning those types with no genuine peaceful uses.
This though is missing the point.... Or trying to use one way of murdering people to justify the means for another.
The stark fact is that no-one outside of the Armed Services within its own controls, needs own military-pattern weapons, whether of 21C or 11C type. There is absolutely no justification whatsoever for any public ownership and availability of these things.
So why do so many Americans think they "need" own even one gun?
I think a lot of it is fear. Not just the heavily-political romanticism of a carefully-edited version of an 18C legal
amendment ( so laws can be amended) for a nation of European settlers not yet having formal army and police; and still fighting other Europeans' colonies, each other and the original residents.
Perhaps a deeply-divided society heavy in real violence, pretend violence in "entertainment" and near-unfettered gun ownership, forms its own fringe-law arms-race. "He who might rob me or burgle my home is probably armed so I'd better be more heavily armed". The criminal realises that so responds in kind. So the law-abiding one, frightened, buys even more weapons and more powerful ones at that.
Tragically, some unwittingly help both arms thefts and accidental shootings by security carelessness or negligence.
Very many Americans own no gun, so must feel neither need nor want of one. Perhaps they don't want the burden that owning a gun for any but a genuine sporting or agricultural reason, implies intent to maim or kill another human being, however they might claim "self-defence".
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Although we have suffered from para-political terrorist attacks using bombs, vehicles and knives, the UK and most other developed nations do not suffer indiscriminate mass-murders for no clear motives, at near-routine levels.
Often "no clear motive" because if the murderer shoots himself or is shot dead at the scene, unless he is later found to have left definite notices of intent and reason, any ascribed motive is speculative. His own death means he cannot be tried in Court, making it far harder to understand what drives some people to commit such murders, hence try to spot and act on the danger signs in others. Very hard, I know, and foiling terrorist attacks also needs other intelligence surveillance approaches.
There have been only about four such non-"political" shootings of complete, and innocent, strangers in more than forty years in the UK; though the worst was in a primary school (Dunblane, with 14 killed).
Further, no-one here tries to exploit such murders in party-politics. Instead, irrespective of political ideology all condemn them out of hand, demand to know how it could have happened, and do not try to blame the victims. If anything, they demand even tighter gun controls, and I think that did happen after the Dunblane atrocity. Some criminals still manage to obtain fire-arms by theft or the illegal arms-trade, usually to shoot each other, but it is very unusual.
Every so often County police-forces here run amnesties that collect and destroy a surprising number and variety of weapons. Apart from war-"souvenir" guns or bayonets, most had probably never been used to kill anyone. One Force donates the wood from scrapped guns' stocks, to a local "Men In Sheds" charity.
In recent years many British schools have been increasing their physical security, but whatever they fear is very unlikely to be embittered young men armed with assault-rifles from the supermarket.
