The same could be said about C++. C is a weakly typed language and was designed to be so, so it's type system cannot really be said to be 'bad'.
Yes, good point. But a lot of people cite C as "the" strongly and statically typed language, and that's just wrong. ("But omg, you have to say 'int i' instead of 'var i'. Clearly this is strong typing!")
C has no types, as a quick (int*)&var will show.
Unfortunately, this is not true in the case of type punning. C used to be the language you used when you wanted to access bits. Now with C99 you cannot * (int16* )((int32* )x).
NB, all compilers make exceptions for unions, but the type punning rule stands, and at work we've actually seen code like the above (for a dynamic typing system) compile to NULL instead of the appropriate reference with GCC. Grrrrrrr.
Seriously? Java has less runtime checking than Perl, and its compile-time type checking prevents only the most trivial errors. If you want to talk about bad type systems, look no further than Java. (Of course, the same could be said about C++ and C too. There is even less of a type system there.)