Stan, the GSG9 guys are only a tiny part of the German police special team s realm.

The police in German cities has what's known as MEK and SEK, with SEK being remotely similar to GSG9 (though not tasked to care about cases like kidnapped airliners, for example) while MEKs are a kind of reinforcement for arrests and also mobile observation units (for lengthy observations).
MEKs do their arrests when the suspect is moving in the public, while the SEK does so if much resistance is expected and in static (barricade, hostage) situations.

Again, the very existence of the MEK shows that German police work isn't much about guns. A MEK policeman can spend years in such a unit without ever needing to draw his weapon and aim at somebody.
Their surprise arrests are more about Ju Jutsu (a German-collected, Japanese-named collection of unarmed close combat techniques including plenty submission techniques; official German police sport) than about pointing guns.

The American approach is much more loose in regard to pointing guns at people (and more), and it shows in the quantity of shots fired at people.
This is mirroring the civilian approach, and I consider this reliance on guns very unsatisfactory, to say the least.